SINGAPORE: A scandal tainted the inaugural Singapore Grand Prix, and at least two people who had been there at the time say that the results of the 2008 race should have been cancelled. The scandal, nicknamed “Crashgate” in the press, involves a deliberate crash on the part of Renault F1 driver Nelson Piquet Jr. so he could help out his teammate, Fernando Alonso.
That year, Brazilian Felipe Massa, driving for Ferrari, had been in the lead at the first-ever F1 night race. He was over five seconds ahead of his chief rival, Britain’s Lewis Hamilton. After Piquet’s crash, it was time to refuel, but Massa returned to the race with the fuel rig still attached to his car, forcing him to stop to remove it. He was also penalized for it, and Massa finished in 13th place.
Hamilton won the Drivers’ World Championship for the year, with Massa in second because of only one point.
Last month, Massa started a legal process to look into grounds to overturn the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix results.
Piquet Jr had been told to purposely crash his car for the sake of Alonso, who went on to win the race. In 2009, the driver exposed what happened after being dropped by Renault. Nevertheless, the results of the race were unchanged.
However, Bernie Ecclestone, who had headed F1 at the time, said earlier this year that he and Max Mosely, then-president of the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA), had known what happened shortly after the situation occurred.
He told the Daily Mirror, “Piquet Jr had told his father Nelson that he had been asked by the team to deliberately drive into the wall at a certain point in time in order to trigger a safety car phase and help his team-mate Alonso. We decided not to do anything for the time being. We wanted to protect the sport and save it from a huge scandal.
There was a rule at the time that a world championship ranking was untouchable after the FIA awards ceremony at the end of the year. So Hamilton was presented with the world championship trophy, and everything was fine.”
Had the results been cancelled, Hamilton would not have won over Massa that year. And after Ecclestone’s comments, Massa decided to take legal action.
More recently, Jean Todd, the boss of Ferrari in 2008 who went on to become president of FIA in 2009, says that he also believes the results of the Singapore Grand Prix should have been overturned.
“There was proven cheating that we only found out about later. The rule at the FIA has always been that the results must be ratified by Dec 31 and that we never go back on them. For this Singapore case, the facts were only revealed a year later, and the sanctions imposed by the FIA before my arrival were cancelled by the Paris Judicial Court.
When I was president of the FIA, I was not informed of this. Discovering that the federation knew the truth before this famous December 31 could indeed change things,” he said.
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