Mosley urges new owners to axe Ferrari bonus

Max Mosley has urged Liberty Media to cut Ferrari’s automatic $100 million bonus “immediately” as it is “very unfair” to the rest of the teams.

Having control of the sport earlier this year, Liberty chief executive Greg Maffei warned Ferrari, Formula 1’s oldest team, that they could lose the $100 million that they are paid annually just for turning up.

“If you’re Ferrari, you have enormous sponsorship revenue that goes directly to you,” Maffei told Forbes. “That’s going to be impacted more positively by great races.

“So thinking about balancing the team payments, so they’re a little more balanced and creates more fairness, has to be weighed, in Ferrari’s mind, I would expect, by the fact that creating a great platform helps our sponsorship revenue, too, so there’s give-and-take.”

This is a sentiment that former FIA president Mosley agrees with.

The Brit, a staunch advocate for budget caps, likened Ferrari’s heritage bonus to the Scuderia being permitted to run a bigger engine than the rest of the field.

Mosley told Sky Sports F1 of the threat to cut Ferrari’s bonus payment: “If it would me, I’d do it immediately.

“The thing is Ferrari are always going to get more sponsorship than the other teams, so to give them the same money from the money you have control of, which is the FOM [Formula One Management] money, it’s completely fair and then they get extra money because they are famous and because they have sponsorship.

“But the fundamental problem is if you’ve got three times as much money as me you may as well have a bigger engine, you’ve got a huge advantage. That plays out in inequality between the cars and the drivers.

“So I’d rather see something where everybody had the same money to spend and the cleverest engineer would make the best car and the best driver would drive better than the other drivers.

“But you’re never going to make it work where you’ve got two or three teams with far more money than the rest. Apart from anything else, it’s very unfair.” – unlike when you start playing online games with promo code.