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Sir Jackie Stewart: Ecclestone and Mosley Should Quit

Sir Jackie Stewart slammed Bernie Ecclestone and Max Mosley for bringing the sport on the brink of collapse. The former F1 champion argued that Ecclestone's focus on immediate financial gain and F1 profit is detrimental to the sport in times of economic regression like these. Stewart therefore joins Luca di Montezemolo in urging the F1 supreme to step down from his role as F1 Chief Executive as soon as possible.

“Nothing is coming back into the sport. The financial distribution of Formula One appears to have been sorted out by two people who have directed it in whichever way they have seen fit. Although this has been a significant benefit in some ways, it has also hurt the sport because the balance of contribution within Formula One is absolutely untenable,” pointed out Stewart in an interview for British newspaper The Times. And it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out who are the two individuals Stewart is making the referral to.

“The teams have got all the capital investment, yet they get no more than 50 per cent of the revenues. The next largest capital investment is by the racetracks who currently receive little or nothing from the revenues apart from what they get for bums on seats. Hardly any of them receive anything from TV revenues or the circuit advertising or the title sponsorship or the commercial hospitality. How can they reinvest when they have little or no income outside of spectator attendance fees?” called out Stewart.

Steward called Bernie's decision to leave the North American continent out of the F1 calendar for 2009 'ridiculous' and insisted change should occur at F1's basics rather than bringing in some non-sense rules like, say, the medal system. He also urged Max Mosley to resign from his position as FIA president, insisting that the sport should be guidelined by someone who is able to reorganize the sport from scratch.

“I think Max should remove himself from the FIA completely and from motorsport and the motor industry. The FIA should replace him with somebody not from within its organization or even within motorsport. They should go out and headhunt a CEO who is going to rebuild the structure in line with modern practice to satisfy the investors in the sport and to give the FIA total transparency,” added Stewart.

Stewart also argued that, had the sex scandal Molsey was part of in 2008 happened within other sport associations – Olympic Committee or the Football Association – Mosley would have been long gone.

“The scandal created the opportunity for a new structure to be born. That opportunity has been overtaken by one man's insistence on remaining, which would have been impossible had it been an Olympic committee, the Football Association or a publicly held company. How can we accept that in a sport so dependent on multinational corporations and even governments for its revenues and which also requires a totally transparent and independent rule-making body?” concluded the Scot.
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