Renault’s admission of guilt in the Singapore race-fixing scandal resulted in a suspended sentence for the team, but much more severe punishments for the key perpetrators, including Flavio Briatore’s permanent exile from Formula 1.
ITV.com/F1 columnist James Allen gives his reaction to the World Motor Sport Council decision and considers the precedent it sets.
I’m not overly surprised at the verdict as far as Flavio Briatore is concerned.
The moment the scandal came to light with all the reams of evidence and Briatore denied it, you knew that this was where this was heading.
Much has been made of Max Mosley wanting Briatore’s head in the same way he wanted Ron Dennis’s head, and there is some truth to this, but it’s not the full story.
Briatore was one of the main cheerleaders for FOTA, driving them on to criticise the FIA’s governance and launch a breakaway series.
It was no coincidence that the vote to break away was taken in a meeting at Renault’s HQ on the Thursday evening of the British Grand Prix, when Briatore provided the champagne with which they toasted their decision.
By all accounts Briatore wanted to be the commercial guru of the breakaway series and was very much the driving force.
Around the same time the European manufacturers’ association issued a statement saying it was time for a change of governance, heaping the pressure on Mosley, who accepted a deal to stand down in return for getting some of the cost-restriction agreements he was looking for.
So there was ‘history’ between Mosley and Briatore – but this Singapore saga was not started by Mosley.
It was started by Nelson Piquet, who was happy to keep quiet about it as long as he had a drive with Renault, but who decided to spill the beans after he was fired.
Once Piquet came forward, Mosley had no choice but to investigate and, as with Dennis, he found that his adversary had presented him with a gilt-edged opportunity.
I am slightly surprised by the outcome as far as Renault and Piquet are concerned.
Renault have been let off with a two-year suspended ban. This was decided on the basis that the punishment for the offence was disqualification, but because they had taken steps to get their house in order and remove the perpetrators, and because they presented an open and honest case to the Federation, the ban was suspended.
Not only that but they would have to do something comparable for the ban to kick in, which is highly unlikely.
I expected some kind of fine, something which would give manufacturers and parent companies a heads-up that they should take care to whom they hand over responsibility for racing in their name.
As for Piquet, he escapes scot-free, which the public and the F1 community will find very hard to accept.
Clearly he was hell-bent on telling his side of the story anyway, to bring down Briatore, so he may have given his testimony without the need for immunity, perhaps in return for a more lenient sentence.
To have allowed him to walk away with nothing sends out a rather odd signal.
Effectively the precedent set by this judgement (and the McLaren ‘liegate’ one too) is that if a team does something seriously wrong in future, the whistleblower can claim immunity and, as long as the management is removed, the team will escape punishment.
But things change quickly in F1 and in a month’s time we will have a new FIA president who might take a different view.
Both candidates propose a revised disciplinary system, which is less reliant on the World Council. So perhaps this precedent will not live long.
But the FIA must always keep an eye out for the credibility of the sport and of its judgements.
It hasn’t got it wrong here, but it has set itself up for criticism if it behaves very differently next time a team over steps the mark.
Let us hope, however, that we never see a team doing what Renault did at Singapore in 2008 again.