Max Mosley's letter to the principals of the ten Formula One teams makes two points which caught my eye. One is that whereas every F1 team exists simply to go motor racing, manufacturers come and go as they please. It was only last year that Ford seriously considered pulling the plug on Jaguar Racing, which was Stewart Grand Prix before Ford bought the team.

The other main point is that new regulations, which will mean that an engine must be capable of being used for at least six races, will mean that in 2006 an engine supplier could give free engines to every car on the grid for what it will cost to supply one team in the coming season.

From this I conclude that, for most of his adult life, Max has been leading Formula One down the wrong path and has finally admitted it.

The first time I conducted a formal interview with Max Mosley was early in 1980. For the previous 13 seasons Formula One had been dominated by the Cosworth DFV engine. Lotus had exclusive use of it in 1967, and Jim Clark won four GPs that year. Cosworth was able to expand production so that McLaren and Tyrrell could buy them in 1968. By 1970 anyone could have one.

At first, Cosworth undertook all the engine rebuilds (today engines are scrapped after so many miles in testing or racing) and in his blunt way Keith Duckworth, maintained a first-come-first-served policy. This led to a race among truckies to be first in line at St. James Mill Road, Northampton, on the Monday after a race. Then other engine builders, who met Cosworth's exacting standards, were supplied with the parts to rebuild engines.

It sounds very amateurish, but one reason why Cosworth succeeded is that the DFV was designed to be built as a production unit and had installed computer operated machinery from the very start. I do not know this for certain, but I am fairly sure that Cosworth did this long before any other maker of automotive engines of any description outside of Japan had thought of doing it.

There was nothing tricky about the DFV, it wasn't a V17 two-stroke or anything like that, and there was no use of exotic materials. Duckworth's genius was being able to absorb masses of information and come up with a logical solution which was often deceptively simple.

Keith was once shown around a design department by engineers of one of the Detroit Big Three. They hung on his every word, looking for even a scintilla of approval. Keith said, "Your porting is all wrong." They were devastated, they were the cream of American designers, they had done all their calculations and had conducted gas-flow tests.