Crashgate: we found the tasty declarations of Symonds and Briatore after Singapore 2008

Going through the archives is always an interesting exercise. It's a dive into a reality of yesteryear, which can sometimes make you smile with the hindsight of 14 years since. Remember Singapore 2008. It was the first edition of the Grand Prix in the island city-state, which was also the scene of the first night race in the history of the great F1. At the end of the Singaporean night, a hero, Fernando Alonso, winner from 15th place on the grid. A performance that no one will have been able to repeat here subsequently.

Logical... since a year later, we learned that the Spaniard's victory was tainted by an act of cheating by the team Renault, with whom he was racing at the time. The action of discord? The voluntary spin of his teammate Nelson Piquet Jr on the 12th lap, while the bull from Asturias was miraculously stopped in the pitlane to refuel and change tires. After the race was neutralized, the Spaniard magically found himself at the front of a Singapore Grand Prix where overtaking is almost a miracle.

Flavio Briatore, ex-boss of the Renault team, awaiting divine transcendence! © DPPI

A year later, the scandal broke out after the revelations made by Piquet himself, the latter confessing that he had been asked to go out at this precise location, on the orders of Flavio Briatore, then boss of the team, and of Pat Symonds, technical director of the French team at the time. Two men who were heavily punished for this act.

14 years later, reopen n°1668 of AUTOhebdo, published on October 1, 2008, is quite a tasty moment! Our two F1 reporters at the time, Jean-Michel Desnoues (still working with us!) and the late Patrick Camus, were in fact on site in 2008 to collect everyone's comments, starting with the Briatore-Symonds duo.

The first to come into play was the British engineer. His goal ? Give credibility to Alonso's decisive pit stop after only 12 laps when no simulation predicted a stop at that precise moment. “We left for three stops, he explained in the stifling heat of Singapore. The initial strategy was to get rid of the very soft tires from the start that we didn't like, and to allow Fernando to gain positions during his short first stint. We had fuel for 14 laps, but we stopped on the 12th. A good decision! » A very good decision indeed…!

AUTOhebdo N°1668, covering the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix.

A colorful character, Flavio Briatore went so far as to evoke transcendence to explain what had just happened on the track. “Sometimes you have to believe in divine justice” indeed blurted the Italian. “Okay, luck gave us a helping hand with the neutralization, but we had to have everything else available on this particular terrain. » And then, it was time for the final blow. With a sentence that has aged particularly poorly. “We weren’t the ones who asked him to do it., he said jokingly, as if to short-circuit the rumor before it grew, even if it meant scratching his second pilot who had just recited with perfection the Machiavellian plan decided beforehand. "I don't think he (Nelson Piquet Jnr) did it himself on purpose. And then, this is not the first time that Piquet has gone out…. But this time the timing was good” ! After all, the bigger the better, the better!

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