Motorsport mourns one of its most colorful and controversial figures.

On Monday night Max Mosley, the former president of the International Automobile Federation (FIA), died at the age of 81 after a long battle with cancer.

Hardly any other person in this sport has polarized as much as the trained lawyer from London.

At most his old partner Bernie Ecclestone, who after the news of death said he had “lost a family member”.

Mosley was feared and respected at the same time. A man of principle who knew what he wanted and who carried out his plans against all odds. Mostly with the better arguments. Mosley was intelligent, quick-witted, eloquent, persuasive, and financially independent. “I had inherited a modest fortune. That's why I was never for sale. ”He was his opponents, and there were many of them, mostly one step ahead. And he let her feel it.

“If Max had one weakness,” Ecclestone once said, “it was that he was not satisfied with a win. He made the losers feel that he was smarter than them. ”In Ecclestone's opinion, the friend would have become the best prime minister in the country since Sir Winston Churchill, but Mosley's career as a politician was never granted. The attempt to serve up with the Tories met with too much resistance because of its origins. His father Sir Oswald was the founder of the English Fascist Party.

Max Mosley wanted to design things. In motor racing he lived out what he was denied in politics. Together with Ecclestone he ruled Formula 1 for 30 years. In the 1970s as an underground fighter and legal advisor to the designers. From 1993 to 2009 on an official mission as FIA President. Mosley drove himself and was the founder of the racing team March, which entered Formula 1 in 1970. Unlike the typical official, Mosley was a man of action. After the fatal Imola accidents in 1994, he launched a campaign that revolutionized motor sport safety. Even today, racing drivers benefit from the foundation that he laid back then.

Mosley was also the first to try to get the cost under control. He was talking about a budget cap when many still thought the word was crazy. And he realized that sport had to stick to sustainable technologies if it was to survive politically. The Kers energy recovery system was introduced while he was still in office.

Mosley's uncompromising manner met with resistance. With the EU Commission, with the automobile manufacturers, and most recently with the teams. They threatened the FIA ​​and Ecclestone with a pirate series from 2008. At almost the same time, a story in England's News of the World about a sex party shook Mosley's credibility. Former MI5 agents had investigated Mosley's personal life on behalf of the magazine and secretly filmed him meeting five prostitutes. The English won this battle too, but it was a Pyrrhic victory. The magazine was discontinued, the laws on the protection of privacy tightened. But Mosley's public image was so damaged that he resigned a year later.