User:ThyFluffyDolphin/Crashgate

There is something fundamentally rotten and wrong at the heart of Formula One. Never in my experience has Formula One been in such a mood of self-destruction. Millions of fans are amazed, if not disgusted, at a sport which now goes from crisis to crisis with everyone blaming everyone else You can't defend [Briatore] at all. What he did was completely unnecessary. It's a pity that it's happened.

Crashgate, known more formally as the Renault Formula One crash controversy, is the absolute worst scandal, not just in Formula One, but possibly even in motorsport history, and managed to be even more controversial than NASCAR taking far too long to ban the Confederate battle flag,, AND. To every account, it is morally warped, turning F1 and motorsport into a gigantic crank magnet and sparked a metric fuckton of conspiracy theories about what happened in the scandal, plus giving opportunities to make just about anything else into a large scale conspiracy. Everything is ever so slightly tainted since this broke out, which makes the -gate suffix an appropriate description for this very event.

In a short summary, Renault, eager to keep their golden boy Fernando Alonso in the team, ordered his teammate, Nelson Piquet Jr., to crash and pull out the safety car, advantaging Alonso and allowing him to win a race in a car which had been largely uncompetitive before that point. While nobody suspected foul play at first, it emerged in 2009 that team prinicpal Flavio Briatore and director of engineering Pat Symonds had ordered Piquet Jr. to crash on purpose. This caused the expected outrage, with both and the Renault team receiving heavy sactioning from the FIA, while Piquet Jr. was protected due to his testimony. Of course, as Jackie Stewart eloquently points out, it all spiralled into a blame game, where Alonso, who had nothing to do with the operation, is considered to have been behind it. Moreover, Briatore and Symonds have been defended as being "harshly treated", and Piquet Jr. is treated as a tragic hero, despite performing a scandalous action which endangers both him and other drivers.

Despite extremely convincing, damning evidence of exactly who orchestrated what, finger pointing has now become commonplace in Formula One, and has extended outward like a franchise in motorsport culture and media. Vettel wins four world championships? "Throw him out". Mercedes-AMG dominate the hybrid era? "They're cheats". It really just spirals from there, and the emphasis on evidence has been lost on practically everyone, all thanks to the most repugnant act of race-fixing ever performed.

Downfall of the Renault F1 Team
Renault had achieved the peak of glory in the mid 2000s under Pat Symonds and Flavio Briatore. Finding the dream talent of Fernando Alonso, whom many argue to be one of the best drivers in the sport's history, the team took two Drivers and Constructors championships in a row. However, Alonso would soon part ways to join McLaren, which proved to be rather opportune when the team began to quickly slump in performance. However, after a falling out with McLaren, Alonso would make a return to Renault, which was an absolute dream for the team... if not for the fact that they were doing even worse than they were in 2007. Of course, this is no usual reason to go to such a length with race-fixing, but there was another critical factor: Alonso's contract, which without a win, or at least third in the Constructors championship, would make him a free agent, with a talented driver like him irresitable to many teams, such as Scuderia Ferrari. The team were far from scoring third, and Alonso had not been able to win a race yet...

And therefore, it's no surprise that convicted felon Briatore, and his sidekick Symonds, would go to extreme lengths to make any one of these things happen.

2008 Singapore Grand Prix
Alonso started the race in 15th with a bad qualifying due to a refuelling error. The team opted for an originally three-stop strategy, putting Alonso on an initially low fuel load, to give him greater speed at the start, and pit him early for fuel. Just two laps after this, Nelson Piquet Jr. coincidentally had, classified in hindsight, a very strange crash. By this virtue, Alonso had magically avoided the pitstop fiasco that slowed down other teams, putting him right up in front, avoiding two extra stops, and taking a surprise victory. This certainly brought a great deal of confidence to the team, enduring a winless season beforehand and what looked to be a second winless season coming up fast. Overall, Renault looked to be performing better at the end of the season anyway, which placed Alonso fifth in the Drivers championship, and Renault ended up fourth. Either way, a decent performance had convinced Alonso to sign back on for the 2009 season, with him and most others blissfully unaware of what had actually occured.

The REAL recount of events
Of course, you may have picked up, from the italicised emboldening, that's not what happened. Rather, the "three-stop" was a complete farcical nonsense, which disguised the true plan of Briatore and Symonds. Instead, desperate to not lose their best driver, they ordered Nelson Piquet Jr. to crash straight after Alonso's pitstop, to intentionally bring out the safety car, massively advantaging Alonso.

A quick side point, that is an extremely dangerous thing to do from Piquet, regardless of the circumstances. Not only does it put him in danger, but equally other drivers on the track. Despite colossal improvements to Formula One and feeder series safety standards in recent years, in only 2014-15, we saw the death of, and literally just in 2019 in Formula Two, the fatal crash of. This was long before safety standards were upped further. It's not just morally obtuse for the sake of driver safety, but equally to go along with such an act. There was no reason for Piquet Jr. to do this. Financially stable as son of an F1 three-time World Champion, opportunities would've not been lost, and good proof is when he won the first Formula E championship in 2014-15.

And so it goes, Alonso wins the race, celebrate, yada yada, roll credits on Singapore. Nobody suspects anything whatsoever, with only Briatore, Symonds and Piquet Jr. aware, and it all could have been kept completely under wraps. But then they fired Piquet Jr. in 2009 and then...