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Thursday, June 25, 2009 19:53 IST

A friend of mine, who is well-connected in F1 circles, recently remarked that he won't play poker with Max Mosley if the stakes are high. "He is good at calling the bluff," the friend told me last week when the FIA-FOTA war was its peak with neither side ready to blink. However, as both the parties reached an agreement on Wednesday, it has become quite clear that it was Mosley who not only blinked first but has had to endorse almost everything that FOTA has been demanding.

That the World Motor Sports Council meeting forced Mosley to accept FOTA's demands suggests that the 69-year-old embattled FIA president had made the conflict with FOTA a personal affair. But did Mosley have to stretch this issue so far in order to keep his ego intact?

Without going into the merit of the point of views of both sides, let us see how much support Mosley had. Within FOTA, two current teams - one of which is a complete newcomer and the other a faded force and a known Mosley loyalist - supported the FIA president. These two teams are relative lightweights in Formula One. The big guns had united to not only to prevent Mosley from making certain rule changes but also to get rid of Mosley himself. The eight teams, a majority of who are automobile giants, were not impressed by the fact that FIA changed rules without taking them into confidence. They were also piqued with the other old man Bernie Ecclestone, whose company Formula One Management (FOM) was not giving the teams their share of revenue.

The team's frustration with Mosley had reached such a level that they were waiting for the slightest of opportunity to strike at Mosley. That opportunity was presented by Mosley's controversial budget cap for 2010. Mosley wanted teams whose annual budget is in the range of 400 million pounds to cut back their costs to 40 million starting from next year. This was the final straw.

Even Mosley couldn't have expected such a backlash from the teams association that was formed couple of years ago. The unity among the teams was the single biggest factor that caused Mosley's downfall. Once Ferrari, Toyota, Renault, BMW, McLaren Mercedes, Brawn GP, Red Bull Racing and Toro Rosso decided to stick together, Mosley knew he was facing a daunting opposition.

In the poker game that followed, the teams were ready to gamble everything, including the future of Formula One. By announcing the breakaway series, FOTA not only forced Mosley to show his hand but also managed to pull Bernie on their side.

For once, Mosley lost badly in this poker game by accepting almost all FOTA demands and announcing his retirement.