What's happened is that Max has realised he doesn't have a legal case against the FOTA teams breaking away. He is on record as stating very clearly that, IF Ferrari and the other FOTA teams want to form a breakaway series, they CAN do. That's as good as ripping up the contract and throwing it away. Okay maybe not quite, but it is tantamount to entrapment if he then pursues the teams in the courts.
FOTA only need point out that they have the blessing of the FIA president, autocrat-extraordinaire, in setting up the breakaway series and the case collapses in on itself. The fact that Max refers to FOTA members as loonies wouldn't bode well in court either, nor would the fact that he's been completely intransigent in his methods for a long time now, proposing things that can easily be seen to undermine the very business viability of Ferrari and McLaren etc as well as the viability of the sport as a whole. Most of the problems faced by F1 in recent years can be traced directly back to the FIA.
Support for a FOTA series is massive in the ranks of F1 fans. I'd go as far as to say it's emphatic. I can't find a poll anywhere on the internet where support for FOTA drops below about 85% over the FIA.
Everybody's sick to death of Mosley and the FIA. From anti-McLaren conspiracy theories to pro-Ferrari conspiracy theories (since admitted by the FIA in an attempt to divide and conquer the FOTA - failed - but also now very clearly past-tense) there is support for FOTA breaking away.
This seems to me to be both because of the prospect of returning F1 (or whatever it shall be called) to the status of "pinnacle of motorsports" and ALSO for what it represents to FIA - i.e. "balls to the FIA".
Max has talked about saving money in motorsports. On the face of it, it sounds reasonable. The difference is that FOTA are more interested in saving JOBS. And as far as the public is concerned, in this economic climate, we'd rather save jobs than fill his pockets with money. FOTA represents us all.
The FIA has lost the public, on mass. It may as well rename itself from FIA to FUA (FU All). You can't govern motorsports without a mandate, and the FIA has blown its mandate, all by Max's hand.