Mosley wants to step down as FIA chief next year

World motorsport chief Max Mosley wants to complete his term at the FIA and step down voluntarily next year after 16 years as president.

In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph he defended his right to a private life and said it had no effect on his ability to run the International Automobile Federation.

Mosley is suing The News of the World for unlimited damages for publishing revelations about his involvement in what was depicted as a Nazi-style sado-masochistic orgy with prostitutes.

His future will be the subject of an extraordinary meeting of the FIA general assembly in Paris on June 3, which he asked to be called, during which he faces a vote of confidence.

He told the Telegraph he intends to address the meeting.

"If they wish me to continue, I will continue, if they don't, I'll stop," said the 68-year-old. "But I will also say to them that it was always my intention, because it is, that I was never going to go beyond 2009.

"The reason's very simple, If you stop in 2009, aged 69, you can maybe still do something else useful. Were I to stay on till I was 73, I'd be getting very marginal."

Mosley has faced calls to resign from former drivers and the Automobile Association of America (AAA), the largest motoring organisation in the world with 51 million members in the US.

Australian driver Mark Webber would not comment on whether Mosley should resign but he told the BBC on Saturday:

"The current scandal has brought the sport into disrepute. Whether we like it or not, all of us in F1 are role models, and F1 simply cannot have scandals of this type."

Sport divided

The revelations about Mosley's private life have divided the motor racing world but the president of the sport's governing body claimed he had received a lot of support.

"The fundamental reason (I've not resigned) is that the people who elected me, the presidents of all these clubs, a number of them have written, and for every letter I've had from a club president saying, 'I think you should step down'... I've had... slightly more than seven who said, 'You've absolutely got to stay, don't give an inch.

"It would then be impossible to turn around to all these people, the great majority, and say, 'No, I'm going to walk away', even if I'm inclined to. But my inclination is to stay and fight."

Mosley hoped his reign as FIA president, during which he has introduced measures to give the general motorist, and racing drivers, greater protection, would help swing the June vote.

Mosley, whose father Oswald founded the pre-World War Two British Union of Fascists, said there were no Nazi connotations to his involvement with the prostitutes at a London flat.