For the last month, Formula One auto racing has been shaken by allegations from a back-of-the-field driver that a crash arranged by his Renault racing team in last September’s Singapore Grand Prix enabled Renault’s lead driver to leap from a midfield position to an upset victory.
Many in the sport fear that if the allegation is proven it could be the equivalent of the 1919 Black Sox World Series for Formula One: a scandal that tops all previous upheavals and one that rocks the sport’s already shaky finances, threatening billions of dollars of investment by some of the world’s largest auto companies and corporate sponsors.
Those fears appeared to be confirmed Wednesday when the British-based Renault racing team — financed at a cost of perhaps $300 million a year by the Paris-based automaker Renault — announced it would not contest the allegations when Formula One’s governing body, the International Automobile Federation, also known as FIA, convenes a tribunal to hear the charges in Paris on Monday. The tribunal’s powers include banning Renault from the sport.
“The Renault Formula One team will not dispute the recent allegations made by the FIA concerning the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix,” the team said in a statement.
The statement said the two men who allegedly set up the crash, both veterans of past championships, have left the team. Flavio Briatore, a 58-year-old Italian, was the team’s managing director, and Pat Symonds, a 55-year-old Englishman, was the engineering director.
The Renault team did not return telephone calls.
The day’s developments represented the greatest crisis in the history of a series that has cast itself as the pinnacle of international motor sport, and as a showcase for aerospace-style, groundbreaking technologies that Formula One insiders believe give their series an edge over the more tightly restricted, cost-conscious engineering formulas of Nascar and the Indy Car series that dominate American racing. Formula One claims a worldwide television audience of several hundred million.
There had been no allegations of race fixing in what is now known as Formula One since the 1933 Tripoli Grand Prix.
But Formula One’s stability was shaken before the recent race-fixing scandal by other events, including the imposition of a $100 million fine on Britain’s McLaren-Mercedes racing team two years ago after it was found to have obtained secret technical documents from Italy’s Ferrari team.
Briatore announced last week that he had launched a lawsuit in France. It says the crash allegations were part of an attempt by the 24-year-old driver Nelson Piquet Jr. of Brazil and his father to “blackmail” the team into keeping the younger Piquet as one of its two drivers.
The senior Piquet was a three-time Formula One world champion in the 1980s.
The younger Piquet was fired midway through this year’s 17-race schedule of races in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and South America. The 2008 Singapore race came near the end of his first season in Formula One. At the time he was under heavy pressure after a series of lackluster performances and an inability to match the speed of his teammate, Fernando Alonso, the winner of two Formula One championships with Renault.
Soon after his last race with Renault, Piquet and his father approached the federation with their allegations, details of which have been leaked to reporters covering Formula One, along with transcripts of the governing body’s interviews with those involved. The Piquets said that the younger Piquet was told at a Singapore meeting with Briatore and Symonds that they wanted him to crash at a narrow spot on the track shortly after an unusually early refueling stop by Alonso. The plan, the Piquets said, was for debris from the crash to slow the field behind the safety car, allowing Alonso to seize the lead as the early front-runners made their own refueling stops.
Piquet crashed on the 14th lap of the race, after Alonso’s refueling stop on the 12th lap, bringing out the safety car. Alonso went on to win.
Nothing in the leaked documents showed Alonso was aware of the plans for the crash. He has declined to comment, pending the Paris tribunal.
According to the leaked documents, the younger Piquet said he was “in a very fragile and emotional state of mind” when he was asked to crash, because Briatore had refused to say whether his contract would be renewed for 2009. Symonds was quoted in the documents as saying it was the younger Piquet who raised the possibility of a crash.
For Formula One, the potential impact runs beyond the risk that Renault will be forced out of the series or quit it. The tribunal will hear claims that the Renault team managers organized the crash to snatch an upset victory that would persuade Renault bosses in Paris, looking for cost savings in the midst of a worldwide slump in car sales, not to pull out of Formula One.
If Renault left Formula One, it would be the third major motor manufacturer to quit in the past nine months, after Honda and BMW. With only teams financed by Mercedes-Benz, Toyota and Fiat, the owner of Ferrari, left to draw on the resources of major car manufacturers, Formula One could be forced back to an era when starting grids were composed mainly of small independent teams, without the finances to develop the high-technology engines and aerodynamics that are at the sport’s core.
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