Max Mosley, the “M” in March Cars (joining Robin Herd, Alan Rees and Graham Coaker) and a former president of the Federation Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA) died on Sunday following a long battle with cancer. The Briton was 81 years old.
Like so many of us enthralled by the world of motorsports, Mosley wanted to be a racecar driver. Eventually realizing talent behind the wheel wouldn’t get him to the top of the racing ladder, he aligned with March Cars, which became one of the foremost makers of open wheel racing cars in the 1970s and 1980s.
Mosley’s wealthy family was deeply ingrained in international politics and his parents, Oswald and Diana, were unabashed supporters of Germany’s Adolph Hitler and his policies. Escaping that lineage is one of the primary rationales for the younger Mosley’s interests in motorsports, rather than pursuing a career in law and politics.
The March Engineering firm early aligned with Sir Frank Williams and his own fledgling racing team.
Williams’ team began in the early 1970s and ran March cars as a customer. “Max’s passing,” Williams said, “is particularly poignant for me, given the role he played in the origins of Williams Racing, as the team celebrated its 750th Grand Prix last weekend in Monaco. It is fair to say that the team would not have achieved what it has achieved if it were not for the support Max gave in those early days, and I will forever be grateful to him for that.”
With his family background, Mosley’s political acumen was “always clear” according to Sir Frank Williams. “I had every confidence in the creation of the Formula One Constructors’ Association (FOCA) in 1974. This political skill led to Max having a profound impact – on not only F1 but motorsport and road safety.” Because of his parents’ closeness to the German mindset of the early 1940s, their son could never have used his political capabilities to gain election in Britain.
Mosley was, perhaps, the second effective marshal to racing and road-going safety, after the initial efforts of Sir Jackie Stewart, the three-time Formula One champion whose retirement has been spent working to aid safety in the sport. From the start of his political motorsports career, Mosley advocated for safety and, after the deaths of Roland Ratzenberger and Ayrton Senna during the spring 1994 Italian GP at Imola, he was instrumental, along with Dr. Sid Watkins, in remaking F1’s responses to on-track accidents.
He and Bernie Ecclestone, the tall and short of international motorsports, managed to separate the financial and sporting aspects of both Formula One and the balance of international motorsports when, in 1991, Mosley won the presidency of Federation Internationale du Sport Automobile (FISA), which at that time ran the sport along with the Formula One Constructors Association (FOCA).
For all his good deeds – and there were many – Mosley’s career began to unravel as his boredom with the everyday machinations of running the FIA took its toll. This became evident with the 2005 USGP race at Indianapolis, where Michelin’s tires were unsuited to the recently repaved and re-ground surface of the road/oval Indianapolis Motor Speedway circuit. Mosley stayed in the UK and sent missives from there, rather than fly to the USA and solve the problem. That was the downfall of F1 at Indy.
Then in 2008 a British tabloid broke news of Mosley’s involvement in what was described by the now-defunct The News of the World as “a depraved Nazi sadomasochistic orgy” and its accompanying video. The video was removed and Mosley did win lawsuits against the tabloid, but it pretty much ended his time at the top of the sport. Still, Mosley was remembered by his peers for his skillsets, his many achievements and his epitaph should read, as Formula One historian Joe Saward remarked, “Max Mosley was a complicated yet charming man.”
Max Mosley is survived by his wife Jean and son Patrick. Son Alexander preceded him in 2009.
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