Motor racing chief Max Mosley launched legal action against a tabloid newspaper on Monday, denying involvement in a "sick Nazi orgy" but admitting an interest in sado-masochistic sex.

Mosley, 68, president of Formula One's governing body the International Automobile Federation (FIA), is suing the News of the World over a story which claimed he had taken part in a Nazi-themed encounter with prostitutes.

Lawyers for Mosley, son of 1930s Fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley, said the paper had unjustifiably breached his privacy.

The FIA chief had been interested in sado-masochism from an early age, his lawyer James Price told the High Court, but there were no Nazi connotations to the events covered by the paper which involved five women in a flat paid for by Mosley.

"If the newspaper was hoping to get pictures of Mr Mosley doing a Nazi salute and saying 'Sieg Heil' or doing anything anything else connected to a death camp, they were to be completely disappointed," Price said.

The pictures "were a gross and indefensible intrusion of his private life" and made worse by the "false suggestion that the events depicted involved him in playing a concentration camp commandant, mocking the humiliating way Jews were treated by SS death camp guards in World War Two", the lawyer said.

"If the story had been about (Formula One's commercial supremo) Bernie Ecclestone, it would not have been a 'sick Nazi orgy.'"

Mosley faced pressure to quit his job after the story was published in March along with a series of photographs and video footage on the paper's website. However, he won a vote of confidence at an FIA extraordinary general assembly last month.

The News of the World said it was justified in publishing the story because of Mosley's public role. However Price said the paper was out of touch with Britons on matters of private sexual behaviour and had been acting like a "peeping Tom".

Price said the story had been driven entirely by Mosley's family name and the paper's pursuit of "sexual titillation".

"Bottom-spanking, whip fantasy and role play scenarios are an interest Mr Mosley accepts he has had since quite a young age," Price told the court.

"Most people probably think that S and M behaviour - spanking of bottoms, whips and roleplays, doctors and nurses, Sheik and harem, guards and prisoners - are permissible and private and even funny."

He said people's private lives should remain so unless they involved the exploitation of children or vulnerable people.

"There is nothing of that kind here," he said.

The hearing, expected to last about a week, continues.