The raffish toff with a winning Formula

Max Mosley’s autobiography has been much anticipated: by the motor racing world, by the writers and readers of tabloid newspapers, by social historians, and by lawyers, whom one imagines perusing it with nods, frowns and the occasional wince.

Mosley is a barrister of Gray’s Inn, and it was as a lawyer that, with his friend Bernie Ecclestone, he came to dominate motor racing. Their association began in 1964, when Mosley was a pupil in Lord Hailsham’s chambers and Ecclestone was the country’s top used-car dealer, said to be able to value an entire showroom at a glance.

Ten years later, when they had both made the transition from driving to manufacturing — Mosley with March, Ecclestone with Brabham — they founded the Formula One Constructors’ Association, which, with Ecclestone as its CEO and Mosley as its lawyer, went on to outmanoeuvre the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA, equivalent to Fifa) for the television rights to the sport.

Mosley and Ecclestone made a double-act worthy of Ealing Studios — the raffish toff and the crafty geezer. Dynamic and charismatic individually, together they were unstoppable. Formula One and Beyond fulfills its promise to tell ‘the inside story of Formula One and its evolution since the 1960s’, but one doubts if it tells the full story of the Mosley-Ecclestone partnership. Still, there are some fun memories.

Among foreigners, for instance, they used cockney rhyming slang. At a meeting with Jean-Marie Balestre, Mosley’s predecessor as president of the FIA, at which Balestre was armed with a list of FIA dissidents, Bernie said, ‘You do the Cain and Abel, and I’ll hoist it.’ So Max upended the table and Bernie swiped the list, while Balestre wailed, ‘Ma liste, ma liste, merde! Où est ma liste?’

Mosley first went motor racing during the Oxford Easter vacation of 1960, at Silverstone, watching Stirling Moss and Graham Hill, and as a young man he raced in Formula Two at Goodwood, where he decided to devote his life to the sport after he overheard one of the other drivers say, ‘Max Mosley, he must be a relation of… Alf Moseley, the coach-builder from Leicester.