MOTORSPORT: F1 in the absolute pits

Renault's sorry shame -- will it quit F1 or be pushed?
First there was Spygate, then Max Mosley's sado-masochistic sex scandal, then Liegate, and now Crashgate, which may see Renault out of Formula One within days – either of its own choice, otherwise perhaps banned by the World Motor Sport Council.

F1 is addictive, but it's also a filthy, dirty, rotten business – as this latest episode, the allegation that former Renault driver Nelson Piquet Junior was instructed to crash in last year's Singapore Grand Prix to help dual world champion teammate Fernando Alonso to win the race, has highlighted.

During last weekend's Italian GP the Renault team principal, Flavio Briatore, who might most generiously be described as a colorful Italian racing identity, was hitting back vigorously at the allegations of Piquet and his triple world champion father Nelson Senior, saying criminal proceedings were being instigated against them. Today Briatore is gone from Renault – in absolute disgrace.

Gone too is the team's technical director, Pat Symmonds.

Renault says only that it will not dispute the allegations against it at next Monday's hearing by the Federation Internationale de l'Autmobile (FIA) World Motor Sport Council.

Come what may that hearing will be going ahead, but we wonder whether Renault may try to limit the damage by announcing its withdrawal from F1 before Monday – that is, go before it is pushed.

So much can be said about this shocking affair, which time constraints – among other things – preclude here for now. But the biggest shadow over F1 today (apart from the horrible thought that a driver's safety could be put at risk the way it apparently was), is that the central figure in this shameful episode, Briatore, is the business partner (in Queens Park Rangers soccer club and perhaps other ventures) of F1's long-time supremo, Bernie Ecclestone.

While the racing in F1 this year has been mostly terrific, this Crashgate is the categorical confirmation that the sport is enduring its annus horribilis and that Mosley, due to go as FIA president next month anyway, Ecclestone and their ilk have stayed beyond their use-by date.

Rather than try to enscapsulate ourselves the totality of this latest scandal, we offer a 'steering wheel' for those who want the detail.

For a simple précis of what's happened in the last couple of days we suggest starting with the Autosport report on the exit of Briatore and Symonds, see the Autosport piece.

Then, for those with the appetite for more, we recommend three brilliant articles -- surely award-winning material -- from the website of The Times, by Edward Gorman. The first, headlined "An accident by design: the chicanery that shamed Formula One", an opinion piece headlined "The worst act of cheating in the history of sport" and the third, "Flavio Briatore exits as Renault capitulates on race-fix claims".

The only small fault we could find with Gorman's articles was the mention that Briatore has been a brilliant technical mind. A brilliant mind Briatore indeed does have, but not for the technical substance of F1. His skills have been managerial, but finally he has been unmasked as the rogue so many suspected for so long.

So he's gone, and Symmonds too. A team that won world titles against others spending perhaps twice as much is tarnished, although we feel considerable pity for the manufacturer that bears the team's name as it has probably unwittingly been caught in this mess.

What happens now with this team, if indeed it remains in F1?

The prospect of a French favorite son, Alain Prost, perhaps being brought back to run Renault's F1 effort has been raised by repected F1 resource GrandPrix.com. A superb driver who won four world titles, and was unlucky not to have taken a fifth, Prost's reputation too is tarnished these days by the ignominy in which his own F1 team collapsed.

All of this Renault business overshadows other, brighter things happening in F1.

One is the imminent return of the great name Lotus to the GP grid next year, backed by the Malaysian government and Malaysian business interests (including carmaker Proton), and the rescue of the Sauber team, by somewhat mysterious Middle East interests, following BMW's withdrawal at the end of this season.

The new Lotus joins US F1, Manor and Campos as 2010's rookie teams, all of them set to use the Cosworth engine preferred – indeed almost mandated – by the FIA for new teams.

The most positive sign we see with this Lotus project is the involvement of Mike Gascoyne as the technical director. Gascoyne has vast F1 experience without ever staying anywhere very long, but to our mind he is one of the few engineers to have shown flashes of the creativity that F1 had in the days of Colin Chapman, founder of the original Lotus, and Derek Gardner, the man behind the early Tyrrells.

The danger sign we see, though, with the new Lotus is in reports that its operations will be split between Norfolk, the traditional Lotus county in Britain, and Kuala Lumpur's Sepang circuit, with talk of about 200 workers at each.

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak says Sepang "is where the cars will be designed, manufacturered and tested. It will be ‘Made in Malaysia', by Malaysians".

The PM has an electorate he has to soothe in committing even more Malaysian government money to F1, on top of the operation of Sepang, while Gascoyne put it a little differently.

"Design, manufacturing and support will be run out of Malaysia, but in Norfolk there will be a fully-functioning F1 team."

That sounds more of a hedged bet, and in reality – for the project to have any chance of success – it is going to need to be predominantly ‘driven' from Norfolk, where its base will be at Racing Technologies Norfolk (RTN) in Hingham – about 16km from the Hethel factory of Lotus cars.

Along with Proton, which has already owned the Lotus road car operation for some years, the major Malaysian businesses backing the project are AirAsia and Naza Motor.

We wish it well but hold no hope of it equaling the record of the original Lotus F1 team – 79 GP wins between 1958 and 1994, producing world champions Jim Clark, Graham Hill, Jochen Rindt and Emerson Fittipaldi, as well as fielding the incomparable Ayrton Senna in his early days – let alone cars of the calibre of the Lotus 23, 49, 72, 79, etc.

In a best-case scenario, F1 might even have a 28-car grid next year, with the mysterious company Qadbak – representing "certain Middle Eastern and European-based families" – having agreed a takeover of the BMW-Sauber team.

It seemed to us that, in bailing out of F1, BMW may have been trying to sell an outfit that no longer had a valid entry for next season. We still think that to be largely true, although the FIA is obviously keen to see the GP field bolstered and has granted the entity a "14th place", deeming its application to remain in the sport to be "high quality".

Our hope is that team founder Peter Sauber retains his 20 per cent and that Qadbak becomes a silent but solid partner.

We remember several years ago the honorable Mr Sauber being maligned by many in the F1 paddock as incapable of operating an F1 team at the highest level, but we attribute much of its success – admittedly limited success in the biggest picture – to have been the result of his entrepreneurship and management ability.

Qadbak already owns Notts County soccer club, the oldest professional football team in Britain and where it has installed former England manager Sven-Goran Erikson as sporting director. Qadbak's interest in Sauber will be represented by Lionel Fischer, a Swiss national like Peter Sauber. Hopefully that pair can return Sauber to something like the competitiveness it had last year in finishing third in the constructors' championship behind Ferrari and McLaren rather than where it is now – languishing seventh, with just one podium finish for the season.

And out of the corporate wreckage it may even get to keep at least one of its fine drivers – Robert Kubica and Nick Heidfeld. The latter a better chance of staying put, we suspect.

We've confined ourselves to F1 matters today, and finally on that score draw the attention of readers who may be interested in why Rubens Barrichello is now consistently beating Brawn teammate and world championship leader Jenson Button to an interesting commentary on the BBC website.

But there are other things happening, especially on the SuperGP front on the Gold Coast, which we shall endeavour to get to tomorrow.

While there have been promises from the A1 GP chief Tony Texeira that his open-wheeler show will make it to Surfers' Paradise in seven weeks, the dogs are barking louder about A1's problems and it looks increasingly likely that the carnival will end up becoming what the Queensland government has been determined to avoid – simply a V8 Supercar round.

A dream outcome for V8 Supercars Australia, although its executive chairman Tony Cochrane is not going to be happy about some other developments in Queensland – including the commonsense being espoused by Queensland Raceway and Lakeside operator John Tetley.

More on all of that in due course…

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