Crashgate: Renault's 2008 Singapore Fix

Sorry guys. I had a little outing. That's the voice on the team radio, lap fourteen, Marina Bay, Singapore. Formula One's first ever night race, floodlights burning, and a blue and yellow Renault has just snapped sideways out of Turn seventeen and buried its nose in the wall. Nelson Piquet Junior climbs out, unhurt, head down. Rookie mistake, everyone says. Here's what nobody in that grandstand knows. That crash was ordered. Down to the lap. Down to the corner. And unpicking it will take one fired driver, one Paris courtroom... and seventeen years of lawyers who still aren't finished. Rewind a few hours. Renault haven't won a race in almost two years, and there's talk the company walks away from the sport altogether. Then qualifying goes wrong. Fernando Alonso, double world champion, knocked out by a mechanical failure. Fifteenth on the grid. Piquet Junior sixteenth, right behind him. And Piquet sits in a very strange position. It isn't only the team that employs him. His personal management contract belongs to a company owned by his boss, Flavio Briatore. The man who decides whether he has a career at all. In his sworn statement to the FIA, Piquet describes a meeting after qualifying. Pat Symonds, Renault's executive director of engineering, asks him a question with Briatore sitting right there. Would he be willing to cause a safety car... to help Fernando. Nobody has to explain what that means. Then Symonds produces a map of the circuit, puts a finger on Turn seventeen, and says lap thirteen or fourteen. Why there? Because that corner has no cranes. No fast way to lift a wreck off the track. Crash there and a safety car isn't likely. It's guaranteed. Now the beautiful, ugly part. Under the rules back then, the moment the safety car came out, the pit lane closed. Nobody could refuel. So on lap twelve, Renault call Alonso in ridiculously early. Fuel, tyres, gone. Commentators call the strategy odd. It makes no sense at all. He rejoins dead last. Two laps later, Piquet gets on the throttle hard and early out of Turn seventeen, feels the rear step out... and keeps his foot buried. Wall. Debris. Safety car. Pit lane shut. Every car ahead of Alonso still needs fuel. And can't have it. When the lane reopens, it's carnage. Felipe Massa, leading from pole, pulls away with the fuel hose still attached to his Ferrari. He drops to thirteenth. No points. And Alonso wins... from fifteenth on the grid. Then the fix holds. For an entire year. Piquet's father quietly tells people the crash looked deliberate. Nelsinho mentions it privately to race director Charlie Whiting, who says he'd need a formal complaint. But the kid is still under contract to the men who asked him. So nothing happens. July, two thousand nine. Renault drop him mid-season, citing a performance clause. His Formula One career is over at twenty-something, and everyone assumes he'll go quietly. His father's version is brutally blunt. He told his son he'd never drive in F1 again, so either swallow it... or fight. They fight. Piquet swears a statement naming Briatore and Symonds, and tells investigators one thing. Pull the telemetry. The data, he says, shows he pressed the throttle significantly harder, and significantly earlier, on the exit of Turn seventeen on that one lap... than on any lap before it. Paris. The twenty-first of September. The World Motor Sport Council sits for ninety minutes and calls Renault's conduct a breach of unparalleled severity. Symonds writes a letter admitting his part. To my eternal regret and shame, he says, insisting he acted out of misguided devotion to his team. Briatore denies everything. The council doesn't buy a word, finding the evidence strongly indicates he was personally and directly involved. There's even an anonymous figure buried in the file. Known only as Witness X. The sentences. Renault, disqualified, suspended for two years. Symonds, five years out. Briatore, banned indefinitely from anything the FIA touches. Piquet, full immunity for talking. Alonso, cleared completely... and he keeps the win. And then the punishment itself unravels. January, two thousand ten. A Paris court rules the process was irregular and throws both bans out. Briatore is awarded fifteen thousand euros, Symonds five thousand. They settle, sit out a few seasons, and come back. Briatore returned to that very same team, now called Alpine, eventually as team principal. The pit lane rule that made the whole thing possible was scrapped the following season. But the wound never closed. In twenty twenty-three, Bernie Ecclestone told an interviewer that he and Max Mosley knew during two thousand eight, and stayed quiet to avoid a scandal. His lawyers later said he doesn't remember giving that interview. And Massa, who lost that title by a single point, is suing for sixty-four million pounds. Last November a judge sent part of the case toward trial, while warning that no court on earth can rewrite two thousand eight. One flick of a throttle pedal, on one lap, under the lights... still in court, seventeen years on.