What is your position regarding the current situation in Formula One?

Well, I think after the shock of Honda leaving Formula One there was a lot of concern that we reacted in a correct way and we started with the correct initiatives or intensified those initiatives as in fairness there were a lot of initiatives already started by the teams I think with general support from the FIA. The engine manufacturers within FOTA had introduced the eight million Euro engine and next year it is five million Euros, so for my team that is a godsend. There were a lot of initiatives already underway and perhaps with the economic environment there was a need to review those initiatives and see if we could intensify them but in a structured way and a balance needed to be kept because there were many reasons whey Honda left Formula One but it was not only an economic argument. There was a strategic argument as well and the reaction needed to be the correct reaction. In our view it did not need to be as dramatic as occurred and that is really where the differences of opinion have come in the dramatic reaction the FIA felt was necessary in the circumstances to protect Formula One. I think the balance between the opinion of the teams and the FIA has been different and it has been difficult to reconcile those differences and in trying to reconcile those differences the relationships have suffered. At the present time there is a very difficult relationship between the teams whose, I think, genuine ambition is not to take over Formula One but the teams have a massive investment in Formula One and they want their investment respected. Formula One doesn't belong to the teams. I don't believe it belongs to Formula One. It belongs to the people. Formula One belongs to all of us. It is not something which is owned by anybody. It is like the Olympic Games, the World Cup. It is an entity in itself. It needs respecting and nurturing and it needs to be developed. Really the teams do not share the same opinion as the FIA in the way that it needs to be developed and we have ended up with a situation where some teams have now entered Formula One with a different set of regulations to what the other teams wish to race under, with in fairness a proposal from the FIA to change those regulations again but no guarantee that those regulations can change. They have to be changed with the consent of the teams that are already in Formula One, so we are saying ‘come and join us and we will change the rules again' but what guarantees do we have. It is a very difficult situation. We want to find solutions but if we can't find solutions we will have to find another championship to race in.

You will be aware probably that within the last half an hour the FIA have issued legal proceedings against all eight FOTA teams. I just wondered if I could get your thoughts on that first of all. And just beyond that how much has that further damaged the credibility of the sport?

I think it is quite difficult for us. We have not seen the details of what has happened. I don't want to avoid the question but it is quite difficult for us to answer as we heard just as we were coming into the press conference that that had happened. I think we need to understand what has happened but unfortunately I don't think any of this episode of what is going on at the moment in the short term helps the sport. We all know that. It is just perhaps with a vision of better things that we are prepared to go through it.

Were Max Mosley not the President or if he were to be removed fairly soon could this problem go away virtually overnight?

In no way is it a condition of the conditional entry that the FOTA teams have made that that is the case. It is not something we are pushing for or asking for. It has not entered the discussions. We have had a breakdown in relations and we need to find a way of getting back to a balance between the regulatory body and the competing teams.

This statement from the FIA seems extremely provocative to me. Are any of you aware of any developments that could prejudice the running of this race meeting this weekend or the remaining races in the championship?

I hope something does prejudice this weekend as they [Red Bull] are too quick. I think we are going to have trouble this weekend.

By any measure this is an unseemly mess. Shouldn't you all be ashamed of yourselves for allowing it to get to this situation and to become such a shambles? It is the future of Formula One on the line. It is not something that should be taken lightly.

I've not been an independent for very long but I've seen both sides of the coin, and I've seen life at Ferrari, I saw life prior to that at Benetton where we won the World Championship on a total of £30m a year and I've seen life at Honda and I've seen life as an independent and the key to all of this is finely balanced between the needs of all the groups, all the teams in Formula One. We've got to have systems so that the smaller independent teams can survive with support from the manufacturers where need be and other initiatives. But if we have systems that shut out the manufacturers completely, I think it's to the detriment of the sport. The manufacturers bring a huge amount into this industry, they bring a huge amount of investment, they bring a huge amount of employment, people, so manufacturers bring in an awful lot to Formula One and we've got to be careful not to destroy that and not to shut that out completely. It can't be left unharnessed, we all know that but the door shouldn't shut completely on the input that manufacturers make. It's the investment of Mercedes-Benz that gives me an eight million Euro engine, five million Euros next year. It's the investment of Toyota that's giving Adam an engine at a price that is incredible. Leasing a Ferrari engine a couple of years ago was 25m Euros. We survive because of the manufacturers. They absorb the research costs, they absorb the development costs and they give us an engine – not a subsidy but an engine that is provided on a cost-plus basis and they are not taking any profits out of it, they're just doing it as a service to independent teams. So we have to find that balance between what Formula One can offer for manufacturers and what it can offer for independents. We can't go too far in shutting out the manufacturers because it will be to the detriment of the sport.

Next Wednesday we will have the World Council meeting in Paris. Do you think there is a better forum to discuss what is best for Formula One next year, where a group of people make decisions on behalf of the FIA instead of an individual?

I think there has been a system for trying to make these decisions, through the F1 Commission, through the teams but unfortunately that system seems to have disappeared or certainly not been used for a long time. There are systems which I think have been established that could be used for this purpose, so I don't think we necessarily need to invent anything new. The difficulty now is that decisions have been made and how do we reverse out of those decisions? We should learn from what's happened, to try and avoid getting ourselves into this situation in the future but there was a system under the old Concorde that wasn't perfect but it meant that the teams were involved in all the key decisions and that seems to have disappeared. I don't think there's a need to invent a new system, just refine what was there before.

At the beginning of the year there was a long dispute over the double diffuser and it concerned the members of the FOTA family. How will you deal with problems like this in the future?

I think this issue of finding compromise between the teams… it was a pretty fraught period and if this proceeds we have to have a regulatory body that sits and covers those things impartially for the teams. But I think FOTA has been – and I have been there a very long time – it has been a great initiative. It was never set up to be a challenge to any of the authorities within Formula One or the commercial rights holder. It was set up for the teams to try and work together to present solutions which they had all agreed on. If I give you one small example: wind tunnel usage. There are completely different ends of the spectrum in terms of people's wind tunnel facilities. You've got Toyota with two wind tunnels running flat out 24 hours a day, seven days a week and they made a concession to reduce the hours they run in the wind tunnel to sixty hours total, that's sixty hours total for all their wind tunnels in order to compromise with the smaller teams who didn't have the budget to run two wind tunnels full time, 24 hours, seven days a week. So that's one example where compromise has been found, between the FOTA teams, where the large groups have accepted compromise in the interest of the smaller groups. Now, as a smaller group, I can't ask Toyota to come down completely to my level but I know that there's a smaller difference there between what we can afford to do in the wind tunnel and what they can afford to do. So there has been incredible movement within FOTA. I mentioned the cost of engines; these are all FOTA initiatives, they're all things that the teams themselves have worked together to…. The testing agreement is a totally voluntary agreement between the teams. It wasn't an initiative started by the FIA, it was an initiative started by the teams. We all agreed to it and to my knowledge nobody has ever breached the testing agreement, and that's purely voluntary. So it is possible for the teams to see the way forward and act honourably and sensibly in these things. At one end there is a diffuser argument, at the other end there are the teams sitting down and really working hard to find solutions amongst themselves.

There seems to have been quite a few concessions offered by the FIA at the last debate. What actually stopped a compromise being reached? I notice they are still going to run the Cosworths with the higher rev limit. Was that the stumbling block or is it the fact that you couldn't sign up to something without any guarantees?

One of the dilemmas that the teams have is that the rules are published, five teams have entered under those rules including Adam's team and the rules, as they stand today, are that next year there's a £40m budget cap. You can have a movable rear wing, you can have four wheel drive, you can have double strength KERS, you have any number of things. Now in fairness, Max has said that he will correct those, he will put those back to how they should be and we'll operate under one set of rules but by definition, we're asking for governance which would mean that the governance needs those teams to agree to those rule changes, otherwise it's not governance, so how do we get those teams to agree to those rule changes if the governance, by definition, means that they have to agree to it. I don't know what Adam's position is, he might quite happily say here that he will agree to all of them but there are five teams involved and there are no guarantees. Max, quite genuinely, may believe that he can swing it but we've got to enter the championship on the assumption that those things will be corrected and sorted and I don't know how it's done, maybe inducements that are made to the teams to give them support in some way because obviously they're going to struggle in Formula One but we've got ourselves into this sort of vicious loop. Some teams are more relaxed about finding a solution to that than others but collectively, as a group, it was very difficult for FOTA to accept that.