FIA President Max Mosley set out his vision for Formula One and its sustainable financial future in his keynote address to the Motor Sport Business Forum in Monaco today.

In a crucial week for the sport, Mosley gave his opinion on the withdrawal of Honda from Formula One and what the sport must do to remain both sustainable and relevant in these changing times.

Mosley said: "Honda pulled out because of falling car sales and there is no guarantee that these falling sales, which affect all manufacturers, will not drop further. If they do then we have to prepare for other manufacturers to pull out not only from Formula One but other areas of motor sport as well.

"But what is wrong with Formula One today was wrong before any of the present economic problems cropped up. Essentially it's the rules, which have become ever more restrictive compressing the work of the engineers into an ever smaller area.

"As such, success in F1 today consists of optimizing every single part of the chassis to the ultimate degree and that is both extremely expensive and utterly pointless."

An example in point, according to Mosley, is that one team currently spends over US$1,000 each for a specialised lightweight wheel nut imported from California and uses over 1,000 of these a year. That is over US$1 million for something no fan is aware of and makes no discernible difference to the show.

Mosley said that the continual search for lighter, exotic materials "has created a mentality in F1 where the engineers are only comfortable in refinement, they don't do innovation. That is slowly destroying F1. It is enormously expensive and is not really what an engineer should be doing."

An illustration of this is the Kinetic Energy Recovery System which will be part of the sport next season.

Mosley said: "We've finally found a serious engineering challenge for the teams in KERS. Some manufacturers have risen to this challenge, one manufacturer has produced electric systems which will astonish people when they appear, another team is working on a completely new technology which will also astonish people.

"But some leading teams, such as Ferrari, have said that they don't like KERS because it is 'too complicated'. Could you imagine the great F1 engineers like Chapman or Duckworth saying 'I can't do that because it is too complicated'? It is a symptom of a disease in F1 where incremental change becomes the whole object of the exercise and real serious innovation plays no part."

Mosley added that the aim now is to stabilize the sport by making a low-cost engine available to all teams. In the longer term this will allow the development of ultra efficient down-sized engines, combined with advanced energy recovery systems, which will maintain the relevance of the sport in an ecological age.

Mosley said: "We need dramatically to cut costs and get innovation back into Formula One. We must stabilize the system with a base engine which anyone can have and which is inexpensive, as well as a standard gearbox. That will stabilize Formula One until we can bring in new energy-efficient engines which undoubtedly will be the future.

"But I would hate anyone to think that we want Formula One to lose sight of one of its main objectives, which is to remain the pinnacle of motor racing technology. If properly managed the regulations will ensure that this continues to be the case."