It seems no one in Formula One is clear of some controversy and fighting nowadays, be it Tom Walkinshaw and Paul Stoddart or Bernie Ecclestone and Luca di Montezemolo. Thomas O'Keefe is concerned for the future of the sport and believes only one man is capable of telling everyone to get a grip...

There is an ill wind blowing in Formula One and I don't know about you but it makes me uncomfortable.

At the very pinnacle of the pinnacle of motorsports, Luca di Montezemolo, President of Ferrari, and Bernie Ecclestone, head of Formula One Management ("FOM") - two men who are mutually dependent on one another and heretofore have acted that way - are trading insults. And at the bottom of the sport, Arrows's bankruptcy lawyers are replacing design engineers and mechanics on the payroll of Tom Walkinshaw, whose preoccupation seems to be staving off creditors long enough to transfer the carcass of his once proud Arrows team to the Next Greater Fool and avoid the fate of Prost Grand Prix, which was liquidated earlier this year.

And in the middle tier of Formula One, the self-centered squabbling persists among the established British teams and the wannabees, some of them - like McLaren and Williams - focused on settling old scores with the FIA and Bernie over the Concorde Agreement by forcing the minnow Minardi into arbitration as to the television money previously due the now defunct Prost team. Others, like Jordan, scurry around to replace lost sponsors while relying on blarney to keep up appearances.

Even the giant auto manufacturers are restless, with Ford putting its own progeny - Jaguar - on a short leash because of the team's disappointing performance and lack of contribution to selling Jaguar street cars, and Toyota firing both of their Grand Prix drivers at once. Remarkably, even Steady Swiss Sauber is acting out, firing the dynamic and talented rookie, Felipe Massa, in favor of Heinz-Harald Frentzen, everyone's choice for Journeyman Driver.

Is anybody in a good mood anymore in the paddock, with the possible exception of the Bridgestone engineers and their cheery countryman Takuma Sato?

After taking a vow of silence during the season, Ralf Schumacher, who himself has been criticised for not taking risks in driving situations involving his brother Michael such as Canada 2001 and Brazil 2002 (although he had no trouble running risks by piling into his teammate Montoya at Indy 2002), post-season says his BMW-Williams team is the one that needs to take some risks.

Ralf's brother Michael, known for his level-headedness and discipline and for never putting a foot wrong on the racetrack, mightily mishandled both the Austrian and Indianapolis Grands Prix, one under the influence of team orders and the other of his own concoction, in ways that created a public relations nightmare for Ferrari that has taken the shine off their brilliant season.

Mild-mannered Jaguar driver Pedro de la Rosa says Eddie Irvine is a terrible teammate and doesn't want him back next season. Irvine himself seldom has a good word for anyone except his current boss Niki Lauda and past and possible future boss and fellow Irishman Eddie Jordan.

Jacques Villeneuve and BAR team boss David Richards were at each other's throats for the latter half of the season, bringing BAR's team morale to a new low just as engine supplier Honda was coming good.

Flavio Briatore has decided to focus on driver management again with his clients Jarno Trulli and Fernando Alonso since there is not yet much of a team to manage, though Renault's fabulous Launch Control seems to have a special French twist. Amazingly, even technical directors are getting into the business of carving up drivers, with Renault's Mike Gascoyne - last seen in a car himself crashing a Jordan at the Goodwood Festival - opining that ex-Renault driver Jenson Button is a nice young man but not World Championship material. I am sure we will quite soon find out what Jenson thinks of Gascoyne's future as a technical director.

Ron Dennis, while waiting for Mario Illien and Mercedes-Benz to bring some more ponies to the McLaren's engine bay, seems most focused on the new Paragon Headquarters while Frank Williams, a man who is rumored to have been short of funds in the earlier years of running his team, is returning to first principles and decided to save money for the team by not flying to the Suzuka race.

Max Mosley stopped coming to all but a few races years ago and sends a representative of the FIA President instead, along with a bevy of FIA officials. Adrian Newey now stays in his Woking office with his pencils and drafting board on selected race weekends. Even Bernie has missed the occasional fly-away race this year.

As for the head of Ferrari, Luca di Montezemolo - like Enzo Ferrari before him - apparently stays in Italy for most of the races, but unlike Enzo he takes his helicopter to the European races on special occasions. Indeed, when di Montezemolo came in person recently to one of the races, he did not like what he saw and said: "to be honest, when I come in the paddock now the pits are different. There is no fun anymore and I think it's time to think of this."

Finally, Formula One fans are voting with their feet and with their remote controls and have stayed away or have begun to switch channels or both, thus affecting the future value of the commercial broadcasting rights for Formula One, the Mother's Milk of the Sport.

Where are the Statesmen in this time, when infighting off track has begun to substitute for racing on the track to everyone's detriment, and how will it all turn out?

The problem is that Max Mosley is a lame duck, as he is in his last term of office, or so he has indicated. And even though the team owners do not elect Max (the international auto clubs do), the team owners act as if they do and Max has made enemies amongst the team owners in the context of the European Commission antitrust case and in a myriad of other issues.

The teams know that Bernie is now 72, that Max will be out of office by the end of 2006, that tobacco advertising will be banned by 2006, that the Concorde Agreement itself expires by the end of 2007 and that the manufacturers the teams work with have formed GPWC - a consortium of most of the manufacturers in Formula One, to develop a rival Grand Prix series by 2008. So everyone, it seems, is acting with excessive amounts of license, a kind of post-graduate smartassedness, apparently in the belief that they won't have the current rulemakers and dealmakers around for much longer.

But by far the most anomalous and troubling piece of this mosaic is Ferrari's parent company, Fiat, once the proud industrial giant that epitomized the post-war modernization of Italy itself, which is now reduced to threatening to close factories upon which whole regions of the country depend, selling off non-core assets and the ultimate act of desperation - selling off 34% of its shares in the crown jewel, Ferrari, to a consortium of banks in order to make debt service payments.

Worse still, Fiat sold one-third of Ferrari without even consulting Luca di Montezemolo, the business and marketing-savvy President of Ferrari, who must be in fits at the damage all these Fiat-based financial embarrassments are doing to the Ferrari "brand" he has been nurturing these many years.

Di Montezemolo had publicly stated that the best way to capitalize on the success of Ferrari as a Formula One team and as a manufacturer was to organize an Initial Public Offering of shares to the public, a kind of "Tifosi IPO," and obviously Fiat ignored the long-term wisdom of the Montezemolo approach in favor of pacifying Fiat's creditors short-term.

Enzo Ferrari would be revolving in his grave at what is happening. Enzo once called off a deal in 1963 to "save" Ferrari by selling out to Ford and preferred the embrace of Fiat to which he later sold most of Ferrari; here, 40 years later, Fiat may end up selling out Fiat itself to GM and God knows who will then own Ferrari.

None of this is a pretty picture and with the world beyond Formula One itself still in the economic doldrums, I don't see that the steady downward spiral to which all parties are contributing has hit bottom yet. What is needed is to shock the collective conscience of the Formula One fraternity into the kind of collaboration that must inevitably take place if the sport is to maintain its worldwide appeal while riding out these awkward years between where we are and where we are going.

What should happen next week, at the October 28th meeting of the Formula One Commission, where these warring factions will face one another in a meeting that Frank Williams thinks could be the most significant since the Concorde Agreement itself some 21 years ago?

It would be a lot to ask, but the participants need to rise above their parochial interests and be willing to put everything on the table. No Sacred Cows; no places where the discussion can't go, no rules that are untouchable. The Nine Point Plan already circulated as an agenda to get matters rolling should mostly be scrapped as an opening concession by Bernie and Max so that everyone starts with a tabula rasa.

Bernie will doubtless explain to the teams through charts and handouts that although they have never liked the 47% share of TV revenues the teams are allocated under the Concorde Agreement, those very same TV broadcasting revenues are in decline and that 47% of what those revenues are now is greater than 60% or 75% of the lesser number those revenues will be if something is not done to improve the racing.

Bernie will also remind the group that he now owns only 25% of SLEC, the holding company that indirectly controls the commercial rights to Formula One, and that the other 75% of his holding company is now in the hands of, among others, a consortium of banks.

Bernie might throw down the gauntlet if he can't talk sense to the team owners and manufacturers and say: why should the manufacturers wait until 2008? If you don't like me or the way we run Formula One, why not buy out the banks and/or Bernie's share and have a go at running the whole shooting match yourselves right now if you think you can do it better? - A prospect that should bring fear and trembling to all concerned, with the possible exception of Ron Dennis, who would doubtless rise to the challenge. Bernie will recommend instead that the Concorde Agreement that has served the sport so long and so well be amended and restated even before it expires, to address the legitimate grievances of the teams.

Max must be willing to be flexible with the teams as to the rules so long as the current high level of driver safety he genuinely cares about is not compromised. The one-engine rule is not yet carved in stone and not even grooved tires should be sacrosanct in this discussion.

Max will also remind the manufacturers that he and Bernie once tried to create a rival series and it did not work, which should trouble anyone who has dealt with the two of them: if they could not pull it off, no one can. Drivers want to win the World Championship that was won by Fangio, Clark and Senna, not some replica fabrication put together as a revenue-raising marketing device by the auto manufacturers.

Ferrari must stop threatening to take its football and go home; it is almost as if Luca di Montezemolo wants to deliver on that threat at least once during his stewardship because his mentor, Enzo Ferrari, got away with that kind of behavior more than once.

Ron Dennis and Frank Williams have to make it clear that they want to "catch" Ferrari, not "get" Ferrari. Bernie said not long ago on Ferrari's 50th Anniversary that "I wouldn't like to think of Formula One without Ferrari. I don't know where we would be without Ferrari." He will probably remind everybody of that fact again, or perhaps di Montezemolo will remind Bernie that he said it!

The teams which are in difficult straits financially have to be candid about how bad things are in order to convince the better off teams that they are about to go down for the count unless there is some effort to control costs, testing, and equalize the grid, performance-wise, by more Sauber-like engine sharing, so that sponsors can continue to be attracted to the idea of partnering with one of the mid-field teams.

Bernie should assure one and all that the world feed TV producers will be required in their contracts to give air time to battles back in the field on a regular basis as was done in the latter stages of this season so that sponsors can be assured of some bang for their buck even if their logo is not on Michael Schumacher's mirror. Another contribution from Bernie will have to be to assure over-the-air broadcasting, if only to pacify the European Commission and the GPWC group.

Finally, the electronic sensors that have created the Perfumed Stockade of the Paddock must be modulated somewhat to permit paddock walkabouts down a central lane of the paddock that will not unduly obstruct the mechanics or the glitterati, much in the way the Louvre channels its art museum visitors around the Mona Lisa. Charge a modest fee for paddock viewing as other series do, and this will draw in the spectators currently confined to the grandstands.

But returning back to the Statesmen issue: who is left that this bumptious group will listen to as and when Bernie hands down the remedies that he believes will, as he put it, bring us "a World Championship where the three big teams will battle lap after lap, race after race"? Luca? Ron? Eddie? Tom? Paul? Niki? No.

In the end, it will fall to Sir Frank Williams, a man who has the respect of one and all and who has known first-hand enough success and failure and personal tragedies for several lifetimes. And so, on October 28th 2002, after the bloodletting is over, Frank should let it be known in his modest but no-nonsense way that we have to do what Bernie and Max have settled on as a consensus, even if some of us don't like it, because it is for the good of the sport. All will listen, all will follow, and Chicken Little will be wrong once again.

Here's hoping.