This story illustrates that if the rewards are high enough then the unscrupulous will stop at nothing to attain them; in last year’s Singapore Grand Prix the Renault of Nelson Piquet Jr crashed on lap 47 out of 61 forcing the safety car to be deployed.
His team mate Fernando Alonso in what had proved to be an uncompetitive car all season had pitted for fuel and fresh tyres two laps earlier. This left the rest of the front of the field needing to stop for fuel and tyres but not Alonso who went on to win the race.
The crash happened on a part of the track where there were no cranes available to remove the car, it also occurred at a time when Renault were thinking of withdrawing from F1 due to the costs and lack of success.
A month after he was sacked by the team in August of this year Piquet revealed that he had been instructed to crash by the team principal Flavio Briatore and the chief of engineering Pat Symonds.
Last Wednesday it was announced that they had left the team and that Renault would not be fighting the allegations of race fixing. On Monday Renault received a 2 year suspended ban from F1 so if they do no more wrong then they are home free. Not so Briatore who has been banned indefinitely and this will apply to any F1 team or drive associated with him.
The danger that this pair not only put their own driver in but also everyone else on the track at the time was immense but they calculated that the rewards were worth the risk – cannot help but think that some time in a Singapore jail would be a more fitting punishment.
2 comments:
WOW! How scary to think that someone would purposely put himself into a wall, because an underhanded person with authority over him tells him to do it.
Awful.
I wonder how many events of a similar nature happen in sports all of the time, though. I would hope that it isn't much, given that too much knowledge of something leads to folks speaking up about the corruption.
Formula one has turned into a cross between kabuki and professional wrestling over the past decade or so. Indy car hasn't enough races to be relevant. NASCAR was real racing up into the mid-'90s before it, too, went Hollywood.
Unless one has a small local track nearby, where the amateurs run under the lights on Friday nights, real, unscripted auto races are hard to find these days.
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