Ecclestone Says FOTA Will Destroy Itself from Within

Some of you may have noticed that the 2010 Formula One season was not as full with politics as last year, when everybody was keeping an eye more on the FIA-FOTA battle than the racing itself. Peace, as we know it this season, has made Bernie Ecclestone feel a bit awkward so the F1 supremo decided to light a fire of his own just to spice things up in the series.

It all started during the British Grand Prix, when Ecclestone told the media that there is no room for the Formula One Teams Association (FOTA) in the sport and started a sponsorship dispute with the teams' alliance. To be more precise, the teams' tractor units were ordered out of the Silverstone paddock and Ecclestone warned the 12 outfits not to put their sponsors' names on their pit walls.

“The teams were putting sponsorship on property that belongs to us. I explained to them that's fine and maybe we wouldn't have a problem with that if we could put some things on their cars,” said Ecclestone in an interview with the Evening Standard, explaining the situation a few days after it happened.

Whether this is payback for what happened in 2009, when the FOTA members threatened to form a rival series of their own unless their wishes were secured, we don't know. But we can bet it has got to have something to do with it. Obviously, Ecclestone denies the hard feelings, put predicts a war within the FOTA in the near future.

“I'm not on a collision course with FOTA, they're on a collision course with each other. Competitors will never be together. You can't expect 12 race teams to all be together on everything,” added the 79-year old Englishman.

The FOTA members did not take too long to react to those comments, with their chairman Martin Whitmarsh insisting that the teams' body is a vital component of Formula One without whom progress would not be achieved.

“I think we're looking forward to working with Bernie and making the sport better, not slugging it out with him,” said the McLaren boss.

In addition, Williams' newly invested chief executive Adam Parr suggested this whole mess is only a means by which Ecclestone is trying to light some fires in the series.

“I think Bernie sometimes wakes up on a Wednesday morning and says to himself 'I'm going to yank a few chains'. 99 per cent of the time, we resolve these things without any blood being spilled,” said Parr.

The Williams official is not far from the truth, as Ecclestone admitted in the same interview that “if there are no fires, we light a few of our own.”