Flavio Briatore would not have been hard to find. His abrupt departure from Renault on Wednesday in the wake of the F1 scandal in which Renault were alleged to have fixed the outcome of a race points to a murky connection with the tawdry episode that saw Nelson Piquet Jnr plant his car into a Singapore wall at turn 17 a year ago.
Piquet alleges that he sacrificed his race under the instruction of Briatore and his loyal lieutenant, Renault’s director of engineering, Pat Symonds, who has also quit, in order to shunt unwitting team-mate Fernando Alonso to victory from the shadow of the safety car, which duly came to pass. Briatore denied any wrongdoing.
Yet the fact that his partnership with the French manufacturer he guided to successive world drivers championships in 2005 and 2006 is over and that the team will not contest the charges of race-fixing, leaves the door open to guilt by association.
Briatore has always had a casual relationship with rules, and as a consequence has often trailed controversy in his wake. He has been at varying times with differing degrees of success a ski instructor, a restaurateur, a stock broker, a sweater salesman, an entrepreneur and an F1 team principal.
His first significant move was to poach Michael Schumacher from under the nose of Eddie Jordan, for whom the seven-times world champion made his debut at Spa in 1991. Schumacher’s next race was in blue overalls for Briatore. The man he replaced, Brazilian Roberto Moreno, was not informed that he had been axed. Welcome to Flavio’s world.
His methods are ruthless. Jenson Button was at the sharp end of Briatore’s crocodile loafers in 2003 when he was kicked out of Benetton to accommodate Alonso, despite outperforming Jarno Trulli in the other car. Trulli was managed by Briatore. Infer from that what you will.
One notes the decision of Symonds to fall on his blade alongside Briatore rather than give evidence against him, despite the offer of immunity from prosecution by F1’s regulatory body, the FIA, for his role in the Singapore race controversy. Renault face expulsion despite this turn of events, since it is they and not Briatore and Symonds personally who face the race-fixing charges. Telegraph.co.uk
Only last weekend Briatore said at the Italian Grand Prix at Monza that he knew nothing of the plot. He also took the opportunity to launch a bitter attack on Piquet and said that, together with Renault, he was initiating legal action against the driver and his father for alleged blackmail.
The decision to end Briatore and Symonds’s association with Renault, plus the acknowledgement that the team will not contest the charge of “conspiracy to cause a deliberate crash” in Singapore, will have been the result of a delicate bargaining process over the past few days.
The key players will have been Max Mosley, the president of the FIA, Bernie Ecclestone, the sport’s commercial rights-holder, and senior figures at Renault’s headquarters in Paris.
The best guess is that the company has agreed to a deal that will limit its punishment when the FIA’s World Motor Sport Council meets in the French capital on Monday. Ecclestone has been keen to ensure that Renault, as a company, is not thrown out of the sport and this now looks unlikely to happen.
What will the FIA do instead? At its disposal are heavy fines, suspension from a number of grands prix or the docking of points from the drivers’ and constructors’ championships, this season or next. A fine is a likely component of any punishment, but it is unlikely to be anywhere near the $100 million (now about £60.5 million) record imposed on McLaren Mercedes for cheating through the use of stolen Ferrari technical data in 2007.
The difference between the cases, in the FIA’s view, is understood to be that McLaren repeatedly denied the allegations, whereas Renault have, in effect, put their hands up. It is not clear whether Briatore and Symonds are now beyond the reach of the FIA’s sanction regime or will still be subject to individual bans from motor sport. Times Online
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