While some British newspaper columnists argued that the affair was strictly a family matter for Mr. Mosley, who has been married for 48 years, much of the news media coverage has cast it as a family tragedy in another sense. Stories have recalled how he was 11 weeks old when his mother was taken to prison, and have detailed how the shadow of his parents  his father died in 1980, his mother in 2003  has long fallen across his life.

Mr. Mosley has said that he had hoped for a career in politics, but that his family name made that impossible. Explaining his turn to motor racing, where he had an undistinguished record in the sport’s lower echelons, he has said that he chose it as a career after drivers at a British track in the 1960s speculated that he was related to an Alf Mosley, a prominent builder of British buses. “I thought to myself, ‘I’ve found a world where they don’t know about Oswald Mosley,’ ” he said. “And it has always been a bit like that in motor racing: nobody gives a damn.”

In the wake of the present scandal, that assumption may have to be re-examined.

His explanations of the Chelsea session have run into a barrage of condemnation, some from Jewish organizations. Stephen D. Smith, director of Britain’s Holocaust center, noted that Mr. Mosley had recently proclaimed an “anti-racism” drive in Formula One after spectators in Spain directed racial taunts at Lewis Hamilton, the 23-year-old black driver for the McLaren team who is racing’s latest sensation, and said that Mr. Mosley should abide by his own standard.

“This is an insult to millions of victims, survivors and their families,” Mr. Smith said. “He should resign from the sport.”

A similar rebuke came from a former grand prix driver, Jody Scheckter of South Africa, who won the Formula One world driver’s championship for Ferrari in 1979 and is still the only Jewish driver to have won the crown.

“I don’t believe he can represent anything after this,” Mr. Scheckter said Sunday. “If it didn’t have a Nazi connotation it would be a completely different matter, but for a person in his position, and with his background, it’s unbelievable.”

Similar statements have been made by Sir Stirling Moss, a grand prix legend in the 1950s, and Jackie Stewart, a three-time world champion in the 1970s. Mr. Stewart, a childhood dyslexic whose criticism of Mr. Mosley’s role in the spying scandal last year caused the F.I.A. chief to mock him as a “certified half wit,” told a television interviewer in Bahrain that allowing Mr. Mosley to stay in his post would be an affront to the multicultural nature of Formula One: “He’s president of a global federation that serves many religions, cultures and sensitivities,” he said. “And Formula One goes to many of these parts of the world.”