Damon Hill has never been one for soft-focus nostalgia, and he wasn’t about to start over Max Mosley.
A social media exchange this week, sparked by a birthday tribute marking what would have been Mosley’s 86th, pulled the former FIA president back into the kind of argument that has always followed him: not whether he was clever, but what he chose to do with it.
Former McLaren and Aston Martin communications boss Matt Bishop described Mosley as “scarily intelligent” in his post, adding that the late FIA president could be “hard and even cruel” but remained “a fascinating man”. Hill, a world champion who spent his entire F1 career under Mosley’s FIA presidency, pushed back sharply.
“Don’t be fooled just because he could be ‘funny’,” Hill replied. “It was always at someone else’s expense. I’m not sure intelligence can be called that if it is employed in the service of hatred and division.”
It’s a line that lands with extra weight because Hill isn’t speaking about a distant historical figure; he’s talking about a man whose decisions shaped the sport Hill lived in, week after week, and whose leadership style—by design—rarely sought consensus. Mosley’s era at the FIA (1993 to 2009) was one of consolidation: of power, of process, and, at times, of grudges.
Mosley remains a polarising name in F1 circles, even years after his death in 2021 at the age of 81. His defenders point first, and loudly, to safety. In the aftermath of the black weekend at Imola in 1994, when Roland Ratzenberger and Ayrton Senna were killed, Mosley became a central figure in the sport’s response. Hill was there, in the Williams garage, Senna’s team-mate, living that turning point from the inside.
Even Hill—who clearly doesn’t romanticise the man—has previously credited Mosley’s decisiveness and his legal training for helping F1 move fast enough to protect itself from external restrictions and political backlash. In a Sky News interview after Mosley’s death, Hill described “panic in the air” after Imola and argued Mosley could “see quite clearly what needed to be done,” using his political instincts to get changes made before lawmakers did it for them.
Hill also linked later safety outcomes directly back to that period, pointing to Romain Grosjean’s survival in Bahrain in 2020 as part of a chain that started with the post-1994 push. That’s the enduring complexity of Mosley’s legacy: it’s hard to argue with what F1 became capable of surviving.
But Hill’s objection now isn’t about whether Mosley got things done. It’s about the manner—and the mindset.
Mosley’s tenure wasn’t simply a reform project; it was also an age of bruising governance, where confrontations weren’t collateral damage so much as a tool. Hill has long acknowledged his own view may be “slightly jaded” by decisions made during his racing years, and he’s been particularly outspoken about how the FIA handled the 2007 ‘Spygate’ scandal.
That case ended with McLaren handed a record $100million fine after a team employee was found to be in possession of confidential Ferrari technical documents. In Tom Bower’s biography of Bernie Ecclestone, Mosley is quoted as suggesting the punishment wasn’t just about the offence but also about personal animosity toward then-McLaren boss Ron Dennis: “$5million for the offence and $95million for Ron being a t**t.”
Whether you see that as dark humour, institutional candour, or something much worse probably says a lot about where you sit on Mosley. Hill’s latest comment makes it clear he places it in the “much worse” category: not merely a sharp edge, but a worldview.
Mosley’s personal controversies also cast a long shadow. Hill called on him to consider his position after revelations about Mosley’s private life emerged in 2008—an episode that ended in court, with Mosley later awarded £60,000 in damages after the High Court ruled there was “a reasonable expectation of privacy”. Hill, reflecting in 2021, noted Mosley’s resilience and willingness to “fight back”, describing him as “a formidable individual… someone who you didn’t trifle with lightly.”
That’s another thread in all this: Mosley as a political animal. He worked closely with Ecclestone, and Hill has spoken about the pair as a partnership that wielded enormous influence over the sport’s direction and, crucially, its power structures. In the same 2021 interview, Hill suggested Mosley found it relatively straightforward to maintain control at the FIA—“a bit like shooting fish in a barrel”—and speculated that Mosley may have been frustrated at being blocked from mainstream politics because of his family legacy, as the son of British politician Oswald Mosley.
None of that makes Hill’s present-day criticism feel like a drive-by. It reads more like an old account being restated in plain terms: Mosley’s intelligence is not in dispute; the question is what it served.
In F1, reputations often get sanded down with time—controversies reframed as “colour”, abrasiveness recast as “strength”. Hill’s refusal to do that is, in its own way, revealing. For those who lived through Mosley’s FIA, the legacy isn’t just safer cars and stronger governance; it’s also the memory of a sport run, at times, on the edge of personal combat.
Hill’s point is uncomfortable, but it’s also hard to ignore: a brilliant mind doesn’t automatically deserve applause if the outcome is division by design.
