Mosley to stay away from Bahrain GP over scandal

"He will not go for personal reasons," a spokesman for the ruling body FIA told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

 News reports said on Wednesday that Mosley was busy talking to his lawyers over the affair published on Sunday by The News of the World paper.

 "Mosley has perhaps wisely chosen to stay away from this weekend's Bahrain Grand Prix, claiming that he is too busy with lawyers to make the trip," The Times reported.

 Mosley did not mention attending the Bahrain race in an open letter he sent to the FIA members the previous day.

 He named the Nazi link "entirely false" and said the publication was "a wholly unwarranted invasion of my privacy."

   According to Wednesday's edition of The Times he will claim in his legal battle with The News of the Worlds that he spoke German with the prostitutes because at least two of them were German.

 However, Mosley did not dispute he was the man in the video.    F1 boss Bernie Ecclestone advised Mosley to stay away from the Bahrain race weekend because the local royal family could be offended and the racing only a secondary issue in the case of his presence.

 "He shouldn't go (to Bahrain), should he?" Ecclestone told The Times earlier in thw eek.

 "The problem is he would take all the ink away from the race and put it on something which, honestly and truly, is nobody else's business anyway."

   Mosley said in the letter he was a victim of a "deliberate and calculated personal attack" in connection with an alleged "covert investigation" of his private life, citing high-level sources close to the police and other security agencies.

 Mosley, the son of British Union of Fascists founder Sir Oswald Mosley, said he will stay on the job and has received a lot of support from within FIA and motorsport.

 But there are also calls for him to resign over the affair.

 The Times spoke of "widespread revulsion at his behaviour, whether there was a Nazi connotation to it or not." It also said there were rumours that big car makers were considering asking him to step down.

 "How can you have a leader of industry, which is what Formula One is, who is a pervert?" The Times quoted an (unidentified) "senior figure in Formula One" as saying.