Max Rufus Mosley moved through British politics, the law, and motor racing. He was born in London on 13 April 1940. His father was Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists before the war. His mother was Diana Mitford, one of the Mitford sisters. He was not an only child. He had a full brother, Alexander, and five older half-siblings. The family name stayed politically poisonous. A month after Max was born, his father was interned for campaigning for a negotiated peace between Britain and Nazi Germany. From his teens into early adulthood Max worked in his father’s postwar Union Movement. He left active politics in 1964, later practised as a patent and trademark barrister, and also raced as an amateur. For years he was president of the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA), the grey-haired operator beside Bernie Ecclestone, until he died by suicide on 23 May 2021 after a cancer diagnosis. He was 81.
He dropped physics for law. After a physics degree at Christ Church, Oxford, he decided the subject had no future, read law at Gray’s Inn, and was called to the bar in 1964. Before he was a power in racing he worked on patents and trademarks. He was also an amateur driver, winning often in British national events from 1966 and racing in European Formula Two. That time in the car is what he later drew on when he pushed safety changes at the FIA.
FOCA, the Concorde Agreement, and the FIA
In 1969 he founded March Engineering with Robin Herd, Alan Rees, and Graham Coaker, and represented the team at the Grand Prix Constructors’ Association. FOCA, the Formula One Constructors’ Association, was a later body. Ecclestone, Colin Chapman, Teddy Mayer, Mosley, Ken Tyrrell, and Frank Williams set it up in 1974. It was not the 1969 association. Mosley left March at the end of 1977 and only then became FOCA’s legal adviser under Ecclestone. In the early 1980s FOCA fought FISA over who controlled the commercial side of the sport. He helped draft the first Concorde Agreement: FISA kept the sporting rules, FOCA kept the commercial and television rights. In 1991 he was elected FISA president by 43 votes to 29. Jean-Marie Balestre remained FIA president. Only in 1993 did Balestre stand down as FIA president, taking a new post as president of the FIA Senate, with Mosley succeeding him at the FIA.
One lasting project of his presidency was Euro NCAP, the European New Car Assessment Programme. After the deaths of Formula One drivers Ayrton Senna and Roland Ratzenberger in 1994, he set up an expert group chaired by Professor Sid Watkins. Smaller, less powerful engines, grooved tyres, and the HANS neck device were among the changes that made the racing safer. He then carried that safety work into road cars and led the creation of Euro NCAP. The European Commission later called it the single most important mechanism for making cars safer.
Television rights, tobacco, and the rulebook
While he was in office, the FIA’s tie to Bernie Ecclestone, the man who held Formula One’s commercial rights, was close and messy. In 1995 the FIA gave Ecclestone those rights for fifteen years. In 2001, to keep Ecclestone’s digital-television investment in place, Mosley proposed stretching the rights from fifteen years to a hundred. His argument was that a grant that long was a sale, not an ongoing anti-competitive tie. The deal brought the FIA Foundation several hundred million dollars for motor sport and road safety.
On policy, he successfully lobbied the British Labour government to delay a European ban on tobacco advertising. He told Prime Minister Tony Blair that a sudden ban would push Formula One races out of Europe while the broadcasts, and the logos, still came back into the EU. The Financial Times later reported that he was furious at the outcome, but the delay protected the sport’s commercial position at the time. He also pushed an engine freeze and the Kinetic Energy Recovery System, trying to point manufacturers at technology that mattered on the road rather than at engine speed for its own sake.
2008: a false Nazi frame, then the court
In March 2008 the News of the World published video of Mosley in a private sadomasochistic session with five consenting adult women, and lied that the theme was a Nazi orgy. The public reaction was harsh at first, and his planned involvement in the Bahrain Grand Prix was cancelled. He said there was no Nazi theme. In July that year he won in the High Court against the News of the World. The judge found that, although one participant wore a military-style uniform, there was no evidence the gathering was meant to enact Nazi behaviour or to mock the victims of the Holocaust. The participants were consenting adults. The session was private, and it was not a crime.
Winning did not clear the pictures off the internet. He sued Google and won in France and then in Germany, forcing the search engine to take the links down. His line was that if a search engine will not stop the material itself, it still has to obey the courts in each country. On 10 May 2011 the European Court of Human Rights rejected his argument that newspapers should have to warn someone before exposing their private life.
The teams, and the last years
The 2008 story was loud. What actually pushed him out of the presidency was a governance fight with the teams. In 2009 FOTA, the Formula One Teams Association, which had grown out of the earlier Grand Prix Manufacturers Association, fought the FIA over the rules and threatened a breakaway. He considered a fifth term, then promised not to stand, and backed Jean Todt as the next president. The 2008 scandal did not remove him. The war with the teams did.
After he left he kept a low profile. In February 2018 the Daily Mail reported that he had published a leaflet in the early 1960s linking Black immigration to the spread of disease, and implied he had lied under oath in the News of the World case. He conceded that a passage in the leaflet was probably racist, denied that he had published it, and denied lying in court. Labour then stopped taking further donations from him. In December 2020 the High Court threw out his malicious-prosecution claim against the Mail’s publisher. Mr Justice Matthew Nicklin held that there were no reasonable grounds, and no prosecution had in fact taken place. On 23 May 2021, after a cancer diagnosis, he died by suicide. Ecclestone confirmed the news. He was 81. The inquest found a fatal gunshot wound to the head. He had been told he had weeks to live. He was buried beside his mother in St Mary’s Churchyard, Swinbrook, Oxfordshire. His wife Jean died later the same year, also 81, and was buried with him.
