FIA President Max Mosley turned up in Imola, attending his first grand prix of the season and bravely put himself through the mill of a press conference in the media centre.  Here are some edited highlights of what was a very long session!

On the situation regarding the Phoenix team:

MM: The Phoenix situation is really quite simple.  We believe that they don't have an entry in the championship.  They think they do.  They've gone to or are going to court in England to try and establish if they have an entry and no doubt this will be heard in the next few weeks whether they have an entry or not, but as far as we are concerned, they don't.

Any changes on the tyre rules front?

MM: Well, if we did make changes to the tyres, it would not necessarily be on the grounds of safety as such, it might be on grounds of anxiety about performance.  But we are talking to the tyre companies, yes.  We are a little bit concerned that the cornering speeds are now reaching levels which are not reassuring and so we are now talking about taking measures to stop the cornering speeds going up too much beyond where they are now.

On the one engine per weekend rule for 2004?

MM: In fact, if you were working on engines, it makes much more sense to build a racing engine to last for a longer time than a shorter time.  The idea that you fit perhaps three different engines in a weekend is massively un-economic.  It's terribly wasteful at a time when several of the teams have not got enough money.  Now we can sit there and have some idealised view of things and say, well, it's nice to let everybody do what they want, spend as much money as they wish, but when we start losing two, three or four teams off the back of the grid, suddenly the whole of Formula One is under threat and if you're a governing body, one of your tasks is to try to foresee these difficulties and deal with them.  The problem is that it's all very well for the top teams to say, well, if you save me $20-30 million a year, I will simply spend it on something else, because they've got the money and they can spend it on something else.  We are not concerned with them.  The people we are concerned with are the people who are missing $20m or $30m out of their budget and have got absolutely no way of filling the hole.  If you are spending, which some teams are, as much as $20 or $30m more than you've got, you cannot do that for very long, so somebody has to do something and the function of a governing body is to do it.  The moment you introduce a rule and you say, you may only use one engine per weekend, you save a great deal of money because an 800-kilometre engine costs the same as an 300 kilometre engine, plus, if somebody wants to, they can still continue to use the 300 kilometre engine, they just won't do the practice, they will just do the qualifying and so on.  They might choose to do that.  That will be a matter for them, but you are only using one engine.  If you have a rule saying you will only use one engine, what do you do if somebody needs to use two?  Well, you've got two possibilities.  You either have to have some form of a penalty or you say 'you're out of the event.'  Now it's clearly nonsense, if somebody blows an engine in qualifying to say 'sorry, that's it, you can't race.'  On the other hand, if you just let him race where he would have raced, then everybody will blow their engine who needs to, therefore you have to bring in some form of deterrent and having thought it very carefully, and all the teams concerned discussing it, the overwhelming majority were in favour of moving back on the grid, and ten places was chosen arbitrarily - it could be ten, it could be 12 places.

On the new penalties for bad driving?

When somebody is to blame (for an accident, one of two things happen.  They either continue running, they come into the pits and) repair the car, or perhaps even that, they continue to run or they have to stop.  Now if they continue to run there is a very obvious penalty, a stop-go or a drive-through penalty available, and that is a deterrent to people causing an incident.  The only difficulty comes if you have an incident that puts a driver out of the race, for which he is clearly to blame.  Until just now the stewards had two possibilities.  They could fine him, a maximum of $50,000 (US Dollars) or they could suspend him for one race, exclude him from the next race.  Now you could argue, particularly with one or two of the higher paid drivers, a fine, even a $50,000 (US Dollars) fine is of no great significance.  On the other hand, to stop him competing in the next race is really a massive penalty not just on the driver and his team, but also in some cases on the public.  You needed something between the fine and the total exclusion from the race.  And the compromise that the Formula One commission came up with was to have the possibility for the stewards to move him back ten places on the grid, which is a significant penalty but is not a totally deadly penalty.  It doesn't put him out of the race.  It just puts him at a disadvantage at the next race. 

On having the same Stewards at every race?

MM. The problem is, if you do that they become part of the, I hate to use the word, but part of the circus.  They get to know everybody, they have got their friends and enemies in the paddock, and they are not independent.  We feel it is enormously important to have completely independent people making these decisions who, in the nature of things, will take decisions that sometimes some of us will think are wrong.

Could F1 switch to having a rolling start?

MM: There is no current discussion about having a rolling start.  There have been discussions in the past, quite often, but at the moment it is not something that anyone is putting forward.  For what it is worth, our feeling about a rolling start is that it is if anything more dangerous than a standing start.  The arguments in favour of the rolling start are not sufficiently strong that I would put it forward and I don't think any of our safety people do either.