Post by QPR Report on Sept 19, 2009 21:08:12 GMT
So interesting that I started a new thread. Sorry1
The Times - Briatore Profiled
Fabulous Flavio Briatore’s crash
From high life to scandalous motor racing wipeout. report on the astonishing rise and fall of Flavio John Follain and Mark Hughes
A few hours before the Formula One Grand Prix in Singapore last year, the racing driver Nelson Piquet Jr was summoned to the office of his boss, the wild-haired multi-millionaire Flavio Briatore, who is famed for his volcanic temper.
“I was in a very fragile and emotional state of mind,” Piquet later recalled. His recent performances had been poor and he was worried that Briatore, who ruled the Renault F1 team like a dictator, was not going to renew his driver’s contract.
Alongside Briatore in the office was Pat Symonds, the team’s technical director. According to a signed affidavit made by Piquet later, “Symonds, in the presence of Briatore, asked me . . . to crash my car and cause a safety car incident to help the team.”
Feeling under pressure, Piquet agreed. The plan was that if he crashed during the race, his team-mate Fernando Alonso could take advantage of the ensuing chaos to snatch a surprise victory.
“Symonds took me aside . . . and, using a map, pointed me to the exact corner of the track where I should crash,” Piquet testified. “Symonds also told me which exact lap to cause the incident upon.”
The cars would be racing at speeds of up to 180mph, yet Piquet added: “During these discussions, no mention was made of any concerns with respect to the security implications of this strategy, either for myself, the public or other drivers.”
All that Symonds said, alleges Piquet, was “be careful”.
As the cars hurtled round the track in the night-time race, Piquet readied himself. On lap 13 as he came out of the slow turn 17, he rammed the accelerator down hard — far harder than he normally would. The rear wheels slid wide and, at about 70mph, the car began to spin.
He could have lifted his foot off the power and brought the car back under control. Instead, he floored it. The car bounced off the wall on the outer edge, spun right across the track and slammed into the inner wall, destroying one side of the car and scattering debris.
The plan worked perfectly. As a safety car came on to control the race while the wreckage was cleared away, the strategies of other teams were thrown into disarray — but not Renault’s. Alonso’s fuel load and pit stop plans had been geared for just this scenario. Having started in 15th place on the grid, he roared to victory.
At the time, few questioned the crash. However, last week, details of an investigation into the affair began to leak and Renault was accused of the most scandalous cheating ever known in F1. As the outcry grew, Briatore quit as the team’s head. The boss of Renault said he had done so because Briatore “considered he was morally responsible”.
What kind of man urges an F1 driver to crash on purpose? Who would risk lives to win? And can Briatore, who rose from humble beginnings to the top of F1 — and the embrace of Naomi Campbell among many other supermodel lovers — ever make a comeback?
THE son of two teachers from the small town of Verzuolo in the Italian Alps, Briatore grew up yearning to be rich. “The teacher’s salary wasn’t good, money was always tight. Every time my father bought me a pair of shoes they were always two sizes too big for me because I’d grow into them,” he once recalled. “I hated that. I really hated that. I wanted to make money. I wanted to be the star.”
Friends from his early years say uncharitably that he didn’t know how to do anything, but that he was a natural charmer — simpatico, fun and handsome. Daniela Santanche, an Italian MP and socialite, told The Sunday Times last week: “We both lived in the same area and I’ve known him since I was 12. He’s always been head and shoulders above everyone else.
“Flavio’s very determined, he drives himself very hard and he wants everyone else to be like him. With Flavio, you have to have results. He’s incredibly generous with people who are up to the job — and he’s incredibly atrocious to those who aren’t up to it.”
Driven though he was, Briatore started modestly as a ski instructor, became a restaurant manager and then a travelling insurance salesman. One morning in 1979, his first business partner — Attilio Dutto, owner of a paint manufacturer — was killed in his car by a bomb explosion. The murder was never explained; but some observers noted that the previous owner of the company had been a Sicilian financier who laundered drugs money for the mafia’s Gambino family.
The company went broke and Briatore was sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison for fraudulent bankruptcy. He moved to the Virgin Islands and returned, after being granted an amnesty, to resurface in Milan, working at the stock exchange.
Briatore’s life restarted when his friend Luciano Benetton, founder of the clothing dynasty, recruited him to establish the Benetton company in America. “He’s a hooligan but he’s so simpatico,” Benetton said of him.
It was not until 1988 that he made his first visit to an F1 Grand Prix — in Adelaide, Australia, where the Benetton team was competing. Briatore was hooked and took over the running of the team. After signing a young driver called Michael Schumacher, he started winning — and the riches, yachts, champagne and women began to flow.
The lift to his office in Knightsbridge is lined with faux snakeskin. Inside his lair, he presides from a throne-like armchair embroidered with his initials. In a cheeky nod to his authority, one of his assistants had a special ringtone on her mobile phone for his calls — the theme from The Godfather.
“It’s all carefully cultivated,” said Martin Brundle, who used to drive for Briatore. “The eye candy on the arm, the monogrammed FB on everything, the clothes, the yachts, the private jets; it’s a deliberate branding and it all came about in the wake of his success with Schumacher in the early 1990s.
“But it was in sharp contrast to the way he ran the team; there was nothing extravagant or wasteful about that. Pragmatism and common sense ruled there. He controlled his costs carefully and ran a very tight ship.”
He played to win, sometimes cutting corners. In 1994 Schumacher’s Benetton was found to contain software for a banned “traction control” system. In the same year a Benetton car driven by Jos Verstappen was engulfed in fire at a pit stop. An investigation found that a fuel filter had been illegally removed, speeding up the flow of fuel into the tank. When asked about it by the media, Briatore gave a mock-startled expression and said: “Hey, I dunno difference between fuel filter and coffee filter — need to speak with the tech guys.”
In between talk of fuel filters and driver contracts he’d be off with Naomi Campbell, Heidi Klum, Eva Herzigova or some other supermodel. “He’s absolutely the sort of character that F1 demands,” said Brundle. “It’s difficult not to like the bloke.”
Briatore acquired a restaurant in Mayfair, a Tuscan holiday club, a spa resort in Kenya (which Bono once hired out just for himself and some friends) and a yacht called Force Blue, which has 12 suites and a Turkish bath.
Glitterati flocked to his Billionaire club on Sardinia’s Emerald Coast, where methuselahs of Cristal Champagne cost £35,000, and a bottle of mineral water is a bargain at £45. The club has attracted rich Russians and the Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi; the former Spanish prime minister, Jose Maria Aznar; the supermodel Kate Moss; the steel billionaire Lakshmi Mittal; and the actors Denzel Washington and Bruce Willis.
For two years, one of the club’s beautiful hostesses was Barbara Montereale, 23, who was recently drawn into the Berlusconi sex scandal. She was paid by a businessman to attend a dinner party at Berlusconi’s Rome residence in November — after which her friend, a P******* called Patrizia D’Addario, claims to have spent the night with Berlusconi.
More recently, Briatore took over QPR, the London football team, in partnership with his fellow F1 tycoon, Bernie Ecclestone. Mittal has also joined the venture.
But on the racetrack Briatore was not faring so well. In 2008, the Renault team was in the doldrums, the car firm’s sales were falling and Briatore was feeling the heat.
As the F1 circus arrived in Singapore, Renault had yet to win a race and only four events were left in that year’s championship. It’s not yet clear who first came up with the idea of staging a crash — Briatore, Symonds or Piquet. However, the transcript of radio transmissions between the Renault pit crew and Piquet in the car support Piquet’s version of events.
Shortly before the crash, Piquet made an unusual request: “What lap are we in, what lap are we in?” he asked. Then Alonso called into the pits surprisingly early and refuelled. Shortly afterwards, Briatore instructs an engineer to tell Piquet to go faster. “Tell him, push,” said Briatore. Symonds added: “Tell him to push really hard.”
It was if they were telling him the time had come. Seconds later an engineer cried out: “Nelson’s off. F****** hell. Nelson’s had a crash.” The safety car came out and all the racers slowed down. Alonso caught up with the leaders. When the race resumed, Alonso, with a full load of fuel, was able to sweep into first place as, one by one, other drivers had to go the pits to refuel.
The repercussions went far beyond the race itself. Thanks to Alonso’s victory, other drivers, including Felipe Massa, lost out on vital championship points. A few weeks later Massa was pipped to the world title by Lewis Hamilton by one point. Without Piquet’s crash, Hamilton might not have become champion.
UNTIL the investigation into the scandal, life had been going well for Briatore. Alonso scored more good results, finishing 5th in the championship with two wins: in Singapore and Japan. Briatore also married Elisabetta Gregoraci, a Wonderbra model 30 years his junior. The groom wore slippers with the initials “FE” for Flavio and Elisabetta. Wedding guests included Berlusconi and Alonso, who drove the wedding car.
As Briatore put it afterwards: “We only had 350 people. I knew everyone.” Gregoraci told Hello! magazine: “He’s intelligent — and besides, he has a wonderful car and boat.”
Then Briatore sacked Piquet, who decided to spill the beans about the staged crash. Briatore threatened to sue and claimed it was all nonsense. As the evidence mounted, however, he decided to quit instead.
Tomorrow the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA) will consider the case; Renault has decided not to contest the allegations. The scandal has shaken F1 to its core and Luca di Montezemolo, the Ferrari chairman, said: “Formula One has to change. The way it’s organised today, it’s so boring that people don’t talk about the races or the drivers but only about the scandals. We need new solutions.”
Those close to Briatore, however, say you should never write him off. “My only criticism of Flavio is that he should be more careful about choosing his friends, because he’s generous and friends sometimes use him,” said Santanche. “But it’s really unfair to make him pay now for this F1 scandal.”
The Italian press speculated last week that he might return to F1 after the scandal quietens down. His fall from grace, said Corriere della Sera, “may prove only an arrivederci”.
Some within the motor racing world even say Briatore may have seen the plot as subversion for the greater good — a dramatic, harmless crash and a sensational against-the-odds win. But then not everyone sees things the same way as Briatore. They never have.
Martin Brundle on his friend Flavio, Sport, page 13
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/formula_1/article6841246.ece
The Times - Briatore Profiled
Fabulous Flavio Briatore’s crash
From high life to scandalous motor racing wipeout. report on the astonishing rise and fall of Flavio John Follain and Mark Hughes
A few hours before the Formula One Grand Prix in Singapore last year, the racing driver Nelson Piquet Jr was summoned to the office of his boss, the wild-haired multi-millionaire Flavio Briatore, who is famed for his volcanic temper.
“I was in a very fragile and emotional state of mind,” Piquet later recalled. His recent performances had been poor and he was worried that Briatore, who ruled the Renault F1 team like a dictator, was not going to renew his driver’s contract.
Alongside Briatore in the office was Pat Symonds, the team’s technical director. According to a signed affidavit made by Piquet later, “Symonds, in the presence of Briatore, asked me . . . to crash my car and cause a safety car incident to help the team.”
Feeling under pressure, Piquet agreed. The plan was that if he crashed during the race, his team-mate Fernando Alonso could take advantage of the ensuing chaos to snatch a surprise victory.
“Symonds took me aside . . . and, using a map, pointed me to the exact corner of the track where I should crash,” Piquet testified. “Symonds also told me which exact lap to cause the incident upon.”
The cars would be racing at speeds of up to 180mph, yet Piquet added: “During these discussions, no mention was made of any concerns with respect to the security implications of this strategy, either for myself, the public or other drivers.”
All that Symonds said, alleges Piquet, was “be careful”.
As the cars hurtled round the track in the night-time race, Piquet readied himself. On lap 13 as he came out of the slow turn 17, he rammed the accelerator down hard — far harder than he normally would. The rear wheels slid wide and, at about 70mph, the car began to spin.
He could have lifted his foot off the power and brought the car back under control. Instead, he floored it. The car bounced off the wall on the outer edge, spun right across the track and slammed into the inner wall, destroying one side of the car and scattering debris.
The plan worked perfectly. As a safety car came on to control the race while the wreckage was cleared away, the strategies of other teams were thrown into disarray — but not Renault’s. Alonso’s fuel load and pit stop plans had been geared for just this scenario. Having started in 15th place on the grid, he roared to victory.
At the time, few questioned the crash. However, last week, details of an investigation into the affair began to leak and Renault was accused of the most scandalous cheating ever known in F1. As the outcry grew, Briatore quit as the team’s head. The boss of Renault said he had done so because Briatore “considered he was morally responsible”.
What kind of man urges an F1 driver to crash on purpose? Who would risk lives to win? And can Briatore, who rose from humble beginnings to the top of F1 — and the embrace of Naomi Campbell among many other supermodel lovers — ever make a comeback?
THE son of two teachers from the small town of Verzuolo in the Italian Alps, Briatore grew up yearning to be rich. “The teacher’s salary wasn’t good, money was always tight. Every time my father bought me a pair of shoes they were always two sizes too big for me because I’d grow into them,” he once recalled. “I hated that. I really hated that. I wanted to make money. I wanted to be the star.”
Friends from his early years say uncharitably that he didn’t know how to do anything, but that he was a natural charmer — simpatico, fun and handsome. Daniela Santanche, an Italian MP and socialite, told The Sunday Times last week: “We both lived in the same area and I’ve known him since I was 12. He’s always been head and shoulders above everyone else.
“Flavio’s very determined, he drives himself very hard and he wants everyone else to be like him. With Flavio, you have to have results. He’s incredibly generous with people who are up to the job — and he’s incredibly atrocious to those who aren’t up to it.”
Driven though he was, Briatore started modestly as a ski instructor, became a restaurant manager and then a travelling insurance salesman. One morning in 1979, his first business partner — Attilio Dutto, owner of a paint manufacturer — was killed in his car by a bomb explosion. The murder was never explained; but some observers noted that the previous owner of the company had been a Sicilian financier who laundered drugs money for the mafia’s Gambino family.
The company went broke and Briatore was sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison for fraudulent bankruptcy. He moved to the Virgin Islands and returned, after being granted an amnesty, to resurface in Milan, working at the stock exchange.
Briatore’s life restarted when his friend Luciano Benetton, founder of the clothing dynasty, recruited him to establish the Benetton company in America. “He’s a hooligan but he’s so simpatico,” Benetton said of him.
It was not until 1988 that he made his first visit to an F1 Grand Prix — in Adelaide, Australia, where the Benetton team was competing. Briatore was hooked and took over the running of the team. After signing a young driver called Michael Schumacher, he started winning — and the riches, yachts, champagne and women began to flow.
The lift to his office in Knightsbridge is lined with faux snakeskin. Inside his lair, he presides from a throne-like armchair embroidered with his initials. In a cheeky nod to his authority, one of his assistants had a special ringtone on her mobile phone for his calls — the theme from The Godfather.
“It’s all carefully cultivated,” said Martin Brundle, who used to drive for Briatore. “The eye candy on the arm, the monogrammed FB on everything, the clothes, the yachts, the private jets; it’s a deliberate branding and it all came about in the wake of his success with Schumacher in the early 1990s.
“But it was in sharp contrast to the way he ran the team; there was nothing extravagant or wasteful about that. Pragmatism and common sense ruled there. He controlled his costs carefully and ran a very tight ship.”
He played to win, sometimes cutting corners. In 1994 Schumacher’s Benetton was found to contain software for a banned “traction control” system. In the same year a Benetton car driven by Jos Verstappen was engulfed in fire at a pit stop. An investigation found that a fuel filter had been illegally removed, speeding up the flow of fuel into the tank. When asked about it by the media, Briatore gave a mock-startled expression and said: “Hey, I dunno difference between fuel filter and coffee filter — need to speak with the tech guys.”
In between talk of fuel filters and driver contracts he’d be off with Naomi Campbell, Heidi Klum, Eva Herzigova or some other supermodel. “He’s absolutely the sort of character that F1 demands,” said Brundle. “It’s difficult not to like the bloke.”
Briatore acquired a restaurant in Mayfair, a Tuscan holiday club, a spa resort in Kenya (which Bono once hired out just for himself and some friends) and a yacht called Force Blue, which has 12 suites and a Turkish bath.
Glitterati flocked to his Billionaire club on Sardinia’s Emerald Coast, where methuselahs of Cristal Champagne cost £35,000, and a bottle of mineral water is a bargain at £45. The club has attracted rich Russians and the Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi; the former Spanish prime minister, Jose Maria Aznar; the supermodel Kate Moss; the steel billionaire Lakshmi Mittal; and the actors Denzel Washington and Bruce Willis.
For two years, one of the club’s beautiful hostesses was Barbara Montereale, 23, who was recently drawn into the Berlusconi sex scandal. She was paid by a businessman to attend a dinner party at Berlusconi’s Rome residence in November — after which her friend, a P******* called Patrizia D’Addario, claims to have spent the night with Berlusconi.
More recently, Briatore took over QPR, the London football team, in partnership with his fellow F1 tycoon, Bernie Ecclestone. Mittal has also joined the venture.
But on the racetrack Briatore was not faring so well. In 2008, the Renault team was in the doldrums, the car firm’s sales were falling and Briatore was feeling the heat.
As the F1 circus arrived in Singapore, Renault had yet to win a race and only four events were left in that year’s championship. It’s not yet clear who first came up with the idea of staging a crash — Briatore, Symonds or Piquet. However, the transcript of radio transmissions between the Renault pit crew and Piquet in the car support Piquet’s version of events.
Shortly before the crash, Piquet made an unusual request: “What lap are we in, what lap are we in?” he asked. Then Alonso called into the pits surprisingly early and refuelled. Shortly afterwards, Briatore instructs an engineer to tell Piquet to go faster. “Tell him, push,” said Briatore. Symonds added: “Tell him to push really hard.”
It was if they were telling him the time had come. Seconds later an engineer cried out: “Nelson’s off. F****** hell. Nelson’s had a crash.” The safety car came out and all the racers slowed down. Alonso caught up with the leaders. When the race resumed, Alonso, with a full load of fuel, was able to sweep into first place as, one by one, other drivers had to go the pits to refuel.
The repercussions went far beyond the race itself. Thanks to Alonso’s victory, other drivers, including Felipe Massa, lost out on vital championship points. A few weeks later Massa was pipped to the world title by Lewis Hamilton by one point. Without Piquet’s crash, Hamilton might not have become champion.
UNTIL the investigation into the scandal, life had been going well for Briatore. Alonso scored more good results, finishing 5th in the championship with two wins: in Singapore and Japan. Briatore also married Elisabetta Gregoraci, a Wonderbra model 30 years his junior. The groom wore slippers with the initials “FE” for Flavio and Elisabetta. Wedding guests included Berlusconi and Alonso, who drove the wedding car.
As Briatore put it afterwards: “We only had 350 people. I knew everyone.” Gregoraci told Hello! magazine: “He’s intelligent — and besides, he has a wonderful car and boat.”
Then Briatore sacked Piquet, who decided to spill the beans about the staged crash. Briatore threatened to sue and claimed it was all nonsense. As the evidence mounted, however, he decided to quit instead.
Tomorrow the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA) will consider the case; Renault has decided not to contest the allegations. The scandal has shaken F1 to its core and Luca di Montezemolo, the Ferrari chairman, said: “Formula One has to change. The way it’s organised today, it’s so boring that people don’t talk about the races or the drivers but only about the scandals. We need new solutions.”
Those close to Briatore, however, say you should never write him off. “My only criticism of Flavio is that he should be more careful about choosing his friends, because he’s generous and friends sometimes use him,” said Santanche. “But it’s really unfair to make him pay now for this F1 scandal.”
The Italian press speculated last week that he might return to F1 after the scandal quietens down. His fall from grace, said Corriere della Sera, “may prove only an arrivederci”.
Some within the motor racing world even say Briatore may have seen the plot as subversion for the greater good — a dramatic, harmless crash and a sensational against-the-odds win. But then not everyone sees things the same way as Briatore. They never have.
Martin Brundle on his friend Flavio, Sport, page 13
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/formula_1/article6841246.ece