04/09/2009
FEATURE BY MIKE LAWRENCE
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Just when peace seemed to have broken out in Formula One. and some lawyers were thinking they may have to cancel their order for a new Ferrari, along comes 'Crashgate'. What a relief, for several weeks things were quiet, too quiet. According to a report in the British daily newspaper, The Independent, the investigation is spreading wider than the 2008 Singapore GP.
The FIA has been careful not to mention any race, team or driver, but when Bernie expresses the hope that it will not drive Renault from F1, circumspection flies out of the window. I guess it is a sign of the times that Bernie hopes that the investigation does not upset Renault rather then him expressing dismay that an allegation of race-fixing has been made.
If the allegation turns out to be true, we would be better off without Renault, because this is cheating on the scale of running an over-sized engine. It is not a misinterpretation of the rules such as got Honda a two-race ban.
We should all feel sorry for the parent company and for the many men and women in France and England who contribute to the team and who would have no knowledge at all of the alleged misdemeanour. If it happened, it would have been known to very few people otherwise it would not have taken nearly a year to come out.
Let us be clear, the alleged incident would be easily possible. Piquet Minimus may not have quite cut the mustard in Formula One, but he is a very good driver. Think of him in terms of a footballer who is a key player in one of the top national teams, but who might not make the squad to represent Earth in the Inter-Galactic World Cup.
There are only twenty drivers on a Formula One grid, but there are thousands of footballers contracted to clubs in the English Premiership and their equivalents in France, Germany, Italy and Spain, plus the better clubs in countries with less wealthy leagues. We sometimes forget just how special a driver has to be to get a chance to drive a current F1 car.
Baby Nelson spun on the parade lap at Singapore, not the first to do that, but he gathered it together and endangered nobody else. The guy is not as good as Alonso, but that's no disgrace, he's still pretty special.
It would be easy for a driver of Piquet's skill to arrange a crash without putting himself in jeopardy, movie stunt drivers do it all the time. A dab on the brakes or throttle in the wrong place is all it would need. Piquet Minimus had nobody near him and he had just exited a ninety degree left-hander on a street circuit. Sideways into a wall is not going to be too uncomfortable, or dangerous, a spinning car rubs off speed.
The fact that the car barely bounced back onto the track indicates that it did not collide at high speed. On the other hand, the crash generated a lot of debris from bodywork, wings and the like. If one assumes that it was planned, then the spread of debris achieved the desired result, which was to trigger the Safety Car. Piquet's car was well off the racing line and had it stopped in the same position because of a technical malfunction, a crane would have been deployed.
There is ample coverage on YouTube and the guy was unaffected. He got out of the car, received a round of applause, which he acknowledged, and then ran across the track. It appeared to have been just another racing incident.
The FIA claims to have received new evidence, but we do not know what that is, whether it is verbal allegations or whether there is telemetric evidence like, say, a dab on the brakes in the middle of a corner. We do not know, so it is useless to speculate. We do know that any driver of Piquet's competence could have performed such a stunt and be confident of pulling it off. To say, as some have done, that he would have been placing himself in a potentially lethal situation is patent nonsense.
If such a stunt was so prearranged, there need be nothing obvious on the pit to car radio link. It does not have to be, 'The green parrot flies tonight,' it could be something as innocuous as 'Fernando's stop went smoothly.'
My understanding is that the FIA has employed lawyers and the Sports Group of a private company called Quest Corporate Investigations & Risk Mitigation, which the FIA, Max Mosley, and Ferrari, has used before. Quest is not a bunch of world-weary, wise-cracking gumshoes but is headed by a former Commissioner of the Metropolitan (London) Police - think Scotland Yard - who is also the Prime Minister's Senior Advisor on International Security Issues.
Quest's website reads like a proposal for a television series. Such an outfit does not come cheaply and nobody would dream of engaging Quest on the basis of paddock gossip, in fact they would probably be turned away.
If you are dealing with a crime, and fixing a race is a crime, then you have to look for a motive. It used to be possible to fit an over-sized Cosworth DFV engine to a car, larger engines were made for sports car racing and hill climbing. I have heard of three instances when this may have happened. In every case, it was to win, or keep, a sponsor and in no instance did the car finish. In none of the three instances was the aim to get points or a win illegally.
It was cheating from the same basis that underweight cars were run in winter testing, to attract sponsors, or rocket fuel was used, or someone manipulated the time sheets, when stop watches were used.
Vittorio Brambilla surprised many people when he set pole in his March at the 1975 Swedish GP. The organisers used a light beam to time cars, the March pit overlooked the beam Robin Herd was given the important job of holding out the pit board. He swung the pit board, broke the beam and Brambilla got pole. My source is Robin Herd himself, on the record. The team manager of March at the time was a chap called Mosley, M.
Last year the parent Renault company was evaluating its position with regard to Formula One. The Credit Crunch had begun to bite and the motor industry was among the first to suffer. Today, cars are made so well that it is not much of a sacrifice to hold on to one for another year or so. Renault had gone nearly two years without a win and it is a fair bet that Fernando Alonso was being paid more than the CEO.
It has always been like this with manufacturers, they come and they go. It was widely known that Renault was considering its position. Put yourself in the place of someone for whom that was not just speculation, but their career on the line. We on the outside merely get a hint, we don't know about the close examination, the arguments for and against, feedback from surveys, the opinions of the marketing and PR people and all the rest. We don't know how close Renault came to pulling the plug or if the win in Singapore affected the decision to remain.
Some people have wondered why Piquet might have gone along with the scam. Flavio Briatore runs the Renault team and is also Piquet's personal manager, a position I have long thought untenable. Did Piquet do enough in 2008 to justify a drive in 2009? It is a thought, I know no more than you do.
Piquet Minimus got the boot and that surprised nobody. Suddenly we have crash-gate, a story which broke suspiciously soon after Piquet's acrimonious departure when he described Briatore as an 'executioner.' We can be sure that an investigation was in progress well before the story broke at Spa. The story broke because investigators and lawyers began to interview people. It is a fair bet that before that happened, all the electronic traffic from Singapore had been studied.
The FIA can call in such information and it would be easy to allay suspicion by calling for information from several teams and for several races.
If a driver is found to have brought the sport into disrepute, and deliberately fixing a race surely falls into that category, the FIA can revoke his licence. Sebastien Bourdais lost his F1 drive, but was welcomed to the Superleague series. Juan Manual Montoya has become a front-runner in NASCAR. A talented driver can earn a good living, and lead a good life (fast cars, fast women) outside of Formula One.
Since the FIA could revoke Piquet's licence, possibly for the rest of his life, a deal is likely to have been done. This would have been conducted through lawyers who must respect client confidentiality. Plea-bargaining is likely to have taken place before any hard evidence or affidavit was passed over.
After Lewis Hamilton lied to Stewards in Melbourne and in the following week, it appeared that the FIA took the view that Lewis had succumbed to pressure. Dave Ryan was sacked from McLaren and, soon afterwards, Ron Dennis stepped down. Lewis lost the points he had gained in Melbourne, a tap on the wrist by comparison.
If Nelson MkII had been coerced, one can imagine all kinds of pressure being brought, including that he could be the hero who kept Renault in F1 and, being the hero, he would be rewarded. When the Renault board, not knowing of any impropriety, took the decision to sign the Concorde Agreement and commit to 2012, Piquet was no longer needed.
The decision to replace him was easy to make, what was harder to understand was the decision to retain him for 2009.
What I have written is a speculative scenario mainly based on a credible time-scale. It is not a theory, not even a conspiracy theory, but a lot will have gone on in secret before the cat was let out of the bag at Spa. This is the way investigations work.
There are two things to remember, the FIA claims to have new evidence and the enquiry is extending beyond an incident in Singapore. There would be no such wider enquiry if the investigators had not unearthed other evidence.
Mike Lawrence
mike@pitpass.com
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