Renault’s decision not to put up any defence against allegations that it sought to fix the result of last year’s Singapore Grand Prix has left it firmly in the dock heading into next Monday’s World Motor Sport Council meeting.
The team’s two most high-profile senior figures, team principal Flavio Briatore and engineering chief Pat Symonds, have walked the plank – but it is far from clear that their departures will draw a line under the scandal.
ITV.com/F1 columnist James Allen takes stock of Formula 1's latest unsavoury episode and considers where Renault might go from here, as well as reflecting on Briatore's colourful F1 career.
This is a huge day for the sport and for Renault F1 in particular.
Today the car company accepted that they were involved in one of the most audacious and infamous cheating scandals in the sport’s history – issuing a brief statement to the effect that they would not be challenging the allegations at next Monday’s World Council hearing and that Flavio Briatore and Pat Symonds had both left the company.
In effect, what Nelson Piquet junior alleged has been accepted by Renault and the question now is: will they stay in the sport?
I strongly believe that the FIA would have thrown them out of Formula 1, maybe even out of all motorsport, if they had gone to Paris on Monday and been found guilty.
And let’s not forget that Renault have a big involvement in international motorsport. They run GP2, along with Bernie Ecclestone, they have the World Series, Formula Renault, Clio Cup racing and much more besides.
By coming clean and removing the management figures responsible for this disgraceful plot, they avoid that and probably avoid a really substantial fine too.
McLaren were hit with a $100 million fine because they lied to the first World Council hearing and were only found out at the second hearing because of the emails of Pedro de la Rosa and Fernando Alonso.
The FIA didn’t like the deception and cover-up aspect of this and hammered them for it.
Here Renault have taken the opposite approach. They hope to get off lightly because of that. But we may still lose the team at the end of the year.
Renault were not in the strongest position anyway – lying eighth in the world championship, with no title sponsor in place for next year, likely to lose their champion driver Fernando Alonso and now without their engineering and tactical genius in Pat Symonds.
But there are many really great people at Renault, lots of talent and experience, and one hopes that the company will wish to carry on and put all this behind them.
If they don’t it’s not clear what would happen to Red Bull and Williams, one of whom is currently a Renault engine customer and the other wants to become one.
As for the two figures who have departed, we should be clear that they have not been found guilty, but the implication of Renault’s decision is that the French manufacturer believes they were guilty.
Symonds accepts that a meeting took place with Piquet and that they discussed deliberately crashing, but says it was Piquet’s idea. Briatore denies everything.
If you read the stewards’ report you will see that they weren’t sure whether Briatore was actually involved in this, but it was clear that they felt Symonds was central to it.
The reason why today was the crunch day was because the team had to present a defence dossier to the FIA and so it was ‘put up or shut up’ time.
The whole episode has been really bad for the sport.
Yes it’s been dealt with, but only because the perpetrator came forward to the Federation, not because the Federation was on to it, committed to weeding out cheating.
F1 has had a tough time with its credibility lately, convincing people that it is a sport and not just a cynical show.
And now to add to the humiliation the public sees that people in the sport have such a skewed moral compass that they will plot to crash a car on purpose to fix a result (which stands, by the way – it cannot be reversed now).
Piquet comes out of it terribly. The legal complaint of blackmail Briatore and Renault have made against him in France presumably still stands because that wasn’t contingent on the whether the allegations were true or false, merely that they contend the blackmail was attempted.
Briatore was one of the larger-than-life figures in the paddock of whom there are a dwindling number.
He tried to modernise the sport to get the old school racing purists to see that it was a show more than anything else and that they should focus on that, but he kept talking about it and never achieved it.
He was saying the same things on behalf of FOTA recently that he was saying in the early 1990s.
Formula 1 moves on quickly and it will do so again after this.