Max Mosley has again sought to defend the introduction of his controversial budget cap into Formula 1, rubbishing Ferrari’s fears of a drop in the calibre of teams participating and insisting that without the arrival of new entrants and with ‘just a lot of old men running it’, the sport ‘will die’.

Though each and every one of the present incumbents has now lodged an entry for the 2010 campaign following the long FIA-FOTA (Formula One Teams’ Association) stand-off, it is understood that all save for Williams have done so on the strict condition that the cap – designed to entice more competitors to swell the grid numbers – is deferred until 2011 at the earliest, thereby buying the teams more time to negotiate.

FOTA’s line is that for organisations currently spending in the region of £150 million to £200 million, such a significant reduction in such a short space of time is simply unworkable – and a compromise is believed to have been agreed in principle whereby the upper limit will be brought down gradually, rather than in one fell swoop.

Ferrari in particular has been stringently opposed to the cost-cutting initiative, caustically suggesting that a paddock populated by names like Lola, Team USF1, Campos Meta 1 and Litespeed GP – all of whom have submitted bids for a slot on next season’s starting grid – cannot ‘have the same value as today’s Formula 1, where Ferrari, the big car manufacturers and teams who created the history of this sport compete’, adding: ‘Wouldn’t it be more appropriate to call it Formula GP3?’

Mosley, however, argues that the Scuderia’s brusque dismissal of the capabilities of the potential newcomers is both misguided and short-sighted – and contends that without fresh blood in the top flight, F1 would fade away.

“No sport is healthy without new people coming in,” the 69-year-old Englishman told the Deutsche Presse Agentur. “Ferrari forget that the current BMW team started as Sauber, the current Williams team started with Williams buying a March [and] Tyrrell started a little team at the end of the sixties that was Honda and is now Brawn.

“Even Enzo Ferrari himself came along in 1948 and started from nothing. If you stopped those new entrepreneurs coming in, Formula 1 will die. You can’t have just a lot of old men running it.”

Though they may not see entirely eye-to-eye on the controversial new budget cap that has provoked so much debate within Formula 1 in recent weeks, Max Mosley and Bernie Ecclestone have nonetheless united to round upon the top flight’s oldest and arguably most famous team Ferrari – with one dismissing notions that the Scuderia is indispensable as ‘nonsense’ and the other claiming the way they have gone about opposing the initiative has been idiotic.

There is set to be a further meeting between the teams in the guise of the Formula One Teams’ Association (FOTA) and FIA President Mosley in Monaco today (19 May) in a bid to reach an agreement that satisfies everybody, and averts the threat both of a ‘two-tier’ F1 – with some competitors subscribing to the optional £40 million limit and others not – and of current entrants walking away.

Thus far Ferrari, Renault, Toyota and Red Bull have all vowed to pull the plug should the unpopular rules not be changed in time for the 2010 campaign, with the former taking the dispute up a notch by seeking a legal injunction against the cap in a French court. Mosley is expected to permit the teams until 22 May (Friday) to come up with an alternative solution to the escalating expenditure in what is the world’s most expensive sport, leaving them just a week to then sign up for next season – but he is adamant that despite the enduring stalemate as the clock ticks down, there is no ‘crisis’.

“I don’t think it will happen,” the 68-year-old contended of the pull-out threats. “There is this suggestion that there is some sort of crisis, but I don’t think there is a crisis. We were absolutely up against the deadline for new teams, and if a new team is going to come into F1 they have got to know they have got an entry and they are in. We’ve already left it very late, and that is why it was necessary to have an absolute deadline.

“Now that has been done, they will apply to enter and we will look at the applications and take a decision. Then there will probably be some vacancies, and other teams may decide to enter later or not as the case may be. There won’t be a crisis of any kind, if indeed a crisis at all, until March 2010 when we go to Melbourne. There is plenty of time.

“The people who are up against it time-wise are new teams, because you cannot nowadays just start an F1 team at short notice. That is all underway – and we will see how the new teams look. There are a very large number of people who have expressed an interest, and a significant number of them are serious. The difficulty is that there are going to be more serious teams than the potential three places if all the existing teams enter, so we are going to have to take a view on that.”

Having already engaged in a bitter war of words with Ferrari and FOTA President Luca di Montezemolo, Mosley re-iterated his prior assertion that F1 ‘could survive’ without the only team that has competed in every campaign since the official inception of the world championship all the way back in 1950 – but both he and Ecclestone are equally confident that it will not come to that, with the head of the governing body even going so far as to accuse the scarlet brigade of being afraid of taking on their rivals on a level playing field.

Moreover, it has been reported that Stefano Domenicali only found out about the injunction by text message during last Friday’s FOTA-FIA meeting – a situation Mosley described as almost laughable, with Ecclestone telling British newspaper The Times that Ferrari ’should have [taken the injunction out] before now – idiots’.

“I thought that was quite original,” Mosley remarked, “to send a team principal in without informing him of his team’s intentions. I think he was slightly embarrassed. The idea that they are indispensable is nonsense. It’s a little bit like poor [Ayrton] Senna; he was the most important driver in 1994, but when he very sadly got killed Formula 1 went on. Lotus were very important once too; so were Brabham.

“I would be very surprised in the end if [Ferrari do leave], because they have been saying we are going to leave – yet they seek an injunction to try and get the rules not changed. If they were going to leave, you would think they would just leave. When all the dust settles, sense will prevail. At the moment everybody can posture and take positions, as it will not be an issue until March 2010 – and my view is that Ferrari will race in Formula 1 next year.”

“They’ve applied for an injunction – I’d be surprised if they get it,” he added, according to the Daily Mirror. “If things go as they should go they are going to have to make their mind up. If they want to come racing, they come on the same basis as everyone else. Simply being there and spending more money is not really fair – and it’s not in their interests. They’re saying we have violated an agreement with them. And obviously we’re saying absolutely not.”

“Formula 1 without Ferrari is not as good as Formula 1 with Ferrari, but it is still Formula 1 and it would work perfectly well. It would be very sad to lose them, but otherwise you’ve got to give up governing the sport and just let Ferrari do it. The moment we say ‘we can’t function without Ferrari’ would mean they could dictate all the rules. We can’t have that. They are fully capable of competing with the other teams even if they only have the same money. They have very clever, talented people – they don’t need three times what everyone else has.”

Having already made concessions in abandoning the ‘two-tier’ aspect to the new regulations – with the budget cap now set to be in force for all competitors, only at a figure yet to be determined – Mosley also brushed off suggestions that the situation echoes the infamous ‘breakaway’ threat of four years ago.

“I think the chances of a breakaway are smaller this time,” he is quoted as having said by the Daily Mail. “After all, we are giving them a chance to race and spend less money. Who can say [what happened to Honda] won’t happen to Toyota, BMW, Renault, whoever?

“The £40 million budget excludes engines, drivers, motor homes and promotion. We have a little scope to take other things out, but what we don’t want to do is put the new teams into a position where somebody can spend more money than them as that would be unfair. When you are already down to ten teams, with two spare spaces, then there is a powerful argument to get new teams in – but if you say to people it is €100 million to compete, they say they can’t do it at that cost.”

“When it became apparent that any of the manufacturers might stop at any moment, because Honda did, we knew we had to bring new teams in,” he added, speaking to the BBC. “They (the existing teams) said ‘well, we’ll give you guarantees we’ll continue’, we said ‘let’s have the guarantee’, [but] no guarantee appears. So then we said ‘well, we’ll have meetings to discuss how to bring teams in’, [but] no meeting.

“I think what they may have hoped is [that] we would just sit there and wait and wait and wait, and then it would be too late for the new teams to come in and they (FOTA) would have complete control of the situation. Well, we couldn’t do that, so we had no choice but to take a decision when we got to the limit of time.

“If we don’t have enough entries to fill the grid – which we probably don’t – they (the teams) know they can come later. There’s just a danger there might be too few spaces for those outside. We are very confident we will attract new teams – we’ll probably have six or seven serious applicants. What might happen is that the team that is outside when the music stops, they’d probably have to buy one of the small teams or something. They should think about that before they don’t put an entry in.”

Whilst Mosley may be expecting only a handful of entries when the 29 May deadline dawns – from such as present incumbents Williams, current world championship leaders Brawn GP and Force India as well as prospective new boys Prodrive/Aston Martin, Lola and US GPE – Sir Frank Williams is confident that the situation can yet be resolved, telling the Daily Mail: “We still have work to do among ourselves, but I can’t see anyone not being prepared to race next year.”

Despite fears inside Ferrari that Max Mosley is trying to ‘destroy’ Luca di Montezemolo with Formula 1’s new budget cap, Bernie Ecclestone has promised that he will protect the team the FIA President not so long ago famously and controversially described as being the most important in the sport.

A war of words was waged between di Montezemolo and Mosley prior to the weekend, with the former suggesting that the new cap is ‘fundamentally unfair and perhaps even biased’ and runs the risk of creating ‘two categories of teams’ within the top flight, and hinting that F1 is not necessarily ‘a never-ending story’ for the Scuderia

Mosley subsequently fired back that ‘the sport could survive without Ferrari but his long-time friend, ally and business partner Ecclestone has come down firmly on the side of the Maranello-based outfit, adamant that he will not allow the dispute to degenerate into open warfare.

When asked by The Times about speculation within the squad that Mosley is bidding to ‘destroy’ di Montezemolo – also President of the Formula One Teams’ Association (FOTA), which has frequently been at odds with the governing body’s proposals – the Formula One Management (FOM) chief executive suggested that the Italian would do well not to play hard ball with a man as intelligent and influential as the 68-year-old Briton.

“I won’t let it happen,” Ecclestone urged. “The trouble with Max is he’s not capable, like in the past, of wrapping things up nicely with a pink ribbon and things. He wants to put it in an old cardboard box and tie it with string.

“The trouble with Luca is that you shouldn’t let Max ever be in a position where he can start a debate or an argument. He’s reasonably clever and you won’t win.”

The 78-year-old also professed his support for the £40 million annual budget cap – which he has conceded could yet begin as high as £60 million in 2010 to quell some teams’ unease about the sudden dramatic drop – and argued that given constructive discussions, a compromise could be reached that is acceptable to all parties.

“It would appear that everyone is in favour of the cap, including Ferrari, if we can get them to agree, which we can,” he underlined. “However, there is concern over the amount that is referred to in the cap for some of the teams and also the two-tier system, [but] these are probably not monumental things to sort out.”

FIA President Max Mosley has issued a stinging rebuke to the objections laid out by the Grand Prix Drivers’ Association regarding the new hike in super-licence fees in Formula 1 in 2009 – stating that if they don’t want to cough up, then they can go and race elsewhere.

The GPDA has advised its members not to sign up for their mandatory licences for the season ahead until talks have been held with the sport’s governing body, in the wake of a dispute over the significant increase in price this year – from €1,690 ($2,165) to €10,000, with each point scored coming at a premium of an additional €2,000, up from €447 in 2007.

In a statement issued last week, the GPDA described the rise as ‘unreasonable’ and ‘inherently unfair’, with claims the FIA is merely using the drivers as a source of revenue by which to make up shortfalls in its budget in times of such great economic difficulty – even if three drivers are now understood to have conceded and signed up.

Should there be no change in the current super-licence cost, McLaren-Mercedes’ defending F1 World Champion Lewis Hamilton faces having to pay some $270,000 (£189,980) simply to be able to take to the starting grid this year.

Mosley, though, has pointed to the millions and tens of millions earned by the sport’s protagonists, and in a letter to the GPDA and the top flight’s commercial rights-holder Bernie Ecclestone, he explained that the income from licence fees had in the past contributed towards developments that have ’saved the lives of many super-licence holders’.

“Apart from Formula 1, there are a large number of series and championships where a professional racing driver can earn a good, sometimes very good, living,” the 68-year-old wrote in a letter seen by international news agency Reuters.

“The costs of such licences are fixed by the relevant ASN (national sporting authority), but are usually modest. A driver who does not want, or even cannot afford to pay for, a Formula 1 super-licence thus has many alternatives.

“The drivers who compete in Formula 1 are, in general, by far the highest-paid motorsport competitors. It seems reasonable they should make a tax-deductible contribution to the safety and running of the sport from which they benefit so greatly.

“If it helps I can confirm increases will be limited to inflation for the foreseeable future. I do hope you will all see the fairness of our position and decide to continue to drive in the Formula One World Championship.”