He’s back. The man who orchestrated some of F1’s greatest successes and some of its most grandiose scandals is returning to the sport. Flavio Briatore has returned to the Alpine team.
Ah, Flavio Briatore. The kind of person you love to hate and hate that you kinda love.
In case you’re not familiar with Flavio Briatore, imagine Tony Soprano mixed with Tywin Lannister, a little bit of Walter White sprinkled in, and he’s played by Danny DeVito. He’s cunning, smart, incredibly good at what he does, but also with a violent tendency to break the rules while doing it.
Briatore was team principal of Benetton and later Renault during the 90’s and 00’s. During that time he led Michael Schumacher to his first two titles and repeated the same trick with Fernando Alonso a decade later. He managed the careers of F1 stars like Mark Webber and Jarno Trulli and provided them with opportunities they otherwise would never have gotten. Briatore undeniably did some great stuff in F1.
But he also did some not great stuff in F1. His first job in the sport came just a year after he lived abroad as a fugitive to dodge prison time for fraud. He almost killed the careers of Jenson Button and Jean Alesi during their time at his teams. And you can pick a random year of his tenure in F1 and you’re almost guaranteed to find allegations, suspicions or convictions of fraud and/or cheating.
Crashgate
The most infamous of those moments is undeniably the so-called “Crashgate” scandal. During the 2008 season, it became pretty clear that Renault driver Fernando Alonso needed a miracle to win a race. Rather than wait for that, Briatore decided that he would create his own miracle. At the Singapore Grand Prix, he and the team put Alonso on a very strange strategy, that would involve him make a pitstop so early that it would give him almost no benefit.
And then lo and behold: two laps later, the other Renault driver (Nelson Piquet Jr.) crashed in such a position that it forced the pitlane to be closed and make it so nobody else could make a pitstop or benefit from the safety car. By the end of the race, that meant that Alonso had won the Singapore Grand Prix.
Immediately there were suspicions that this was all a little bit too convenient. Those suspicions would be proven correct a year later, when Briatore did one of his classic moves and kicked Piquet out before his contract was over. Piquet figured he had nothing left to lose and confessed to the FIA that Briatore had orchestrated the whole thing and forced Piquet to crash during that Singapore Grand Prix. Briatore was found guilty and given a ban from the paddock, while Renault suffered such financial and reputational damage that they withdrew from F1 a year later. A French court however overturned Briatore’s lifetime ban from F1, giving him the possibility to return to the sport if he wished to do so.
Piquet's intentionally crashed car during the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix.
Somehow, he’s back
And that’s exactly what Briatore has now done. Renault CEO Luca de Meo has reportedly asked Briatore to return to the team, now called Alpine, and help it get its footing back. This time however, Briatore will not be a team principal or a driver manager. He will instead serve as a special advisor to the team, a sort of supervisor. What that means exactly is unclear. It will probably involve him be a lot more behind the scenes and a lot less in the foreground - something that, given his history, is probably smart.
There is one area in which Briatore could make a real difference, and that’s in attracting the right people. Whether they want to work with/for him is another question, but Briatore has always been incredibly good in bringing qualified people to a team. And that is something that Alpine currently desperately needs. But on the other hand, Briatore has also had no qualms about kicking them out as soon as he grows tired of them, and that is something Alpine currently absolutely does not need.
It remains to be seen what this means for the French team. But it is unquestionably an interesting development.