The Brazilian TV station Globo has claimed that Nelson Piquet Jr was ordered to crash by the Renault team during the Singapore GP last season. The accident resulted in a Safety Car which played into the hands of Fernando Alonso, who had pitted just before the accident occurred.
The result was that Renault was able to win the race, a most unlikely result. At the time I wrote the following: “There was more than a little irony in the result of the Singapore Grand Prix. Nelson Piquet has seemed out of his depth this year and in Singapore he crashed heavily on lap 13. But in doing so he handed victory to his team-mate Fernando Alonso, who had gambled on a very short 12-lap first stint. He was thus perfectly positioned to take advantage of the situation. The other major players were all delayed or penalised and Alonso moved up to the front on lap 34. And there he stayed, while those behind him were trapped behind slower cars. There were some cynics (there always are) who reckoned that the team’s strategy was to have Nelson crash soon after Fernando had completed his stop and thus create a situation in which Fernando gained an advantage over the rest of the field. One can see this argument, but one likes to believe that no team would ever be so desperate as to have a driver throw his car at a wall. In all probability Piquet just screwed up – he has done that a lot this year. If not, he must have been offered something worth having because he needs to impress in the few remaining races as this has been a very poor season. It will be interesting to see whether he gets a new contract for 2009.”
Since Piquet was fired by Renault, claims have been flying around and Globo said today during its Grand Prix broadcast that it has received information that there is evidence available to back up the story. We hear that the FIA may call in an independent body to investigate the claims being made.
It will be interesting to see how the story develops in the days ahead.
joeblogsf1 
a post about this in my brazilian blog at the sameime of the gp of singapoure
http://www.jpezzolo.com/2008/09/cingapura-pitacos-da-corrida.html
(in portuguese)
Hay que ser tonto para creerse lo que diga Globo. jajajaja Ahora quieren vendetta porque Renault largó a PIquet. ¿y vienen ahora con esto despues de 1 año? jajajajaj Si te lo crees eres muy tonto.
If that’s true, that was really a bad idea to fire Piquet… Nelsinho has nothing to lose by telling the truth !
Setting-up a race like this is worse than trying to steal ideas & datas from another team… but Renault isn’t McLaren, maybe the punishment will be less harsh !
I wonder if Alonso knew about this. Bye bye Flavour Flav?
If he really managed to fake that crash he deserves an Oscar. Besides, I think he would have mentioned it himself in the clash he had with Flavio or at least blackmailed him to keep the seat longer…
This is unbelievable!
it sucks the air right out of my lungs. Should this tale come to fruition then F1 as we have come to know it for the past five years is as good as dead. This bombastic accusation puts Alonso yet again into the center of more than just controversy and makes a right joke out of Liar Gate. But it will kill F1 make it as pleasantly straightforward as watching a Don King fight.
Puts your article “A Piquet scorned is a dangerous enemy” spot on but will it stick?
yet another conspiracy theory to bring bad face to f1!! oh dear!!
I always believed that crash was deliberate… the timing was too fortuitous, especially with question marks hanging over Renault’s commitment to F1. I bet Flav wishes he could come up with something similar for this year!
Talk about leaving no stone unturned!! This is another ridiculous witch-hunt by the FIA over a suprise result from almost 1 year ago!!!? Could be just nelson leaving Flashio with a big headache for sacking him, so we will have to wait and see what the “evidence” consists of! Any radio transmissions ordering Nelson to crash will be hard tocome by as far as i can see, but you never know. Personally i would say it was an excellent tactic, after it gave us a thrilling race watching Alonso try to keep thelead, but no doubt the FIA(sco) will deem it to be “unethical, unsporsmanlike and not in the spirit of the sporting code or whatever!!!! Its all good fun until someone getrs deaded!!!! #:)
Spot on. Once again. Which is why we all enjoy reading your commentary! Thank you Joe.
Jesus! Oh for crying out laud! i don’t believe it!
Have these so called stewards and FIA fun police got nothing better to do? This happened last year? if they are really that strapped for something to justify their overbaluted fat pig salaries why don’t they re-open investigations into the fan-car from the Eighties and perhaps they could try and pin Von-Traps killer crash in the Sixties on poor dearly departed Jim Clark again…they make me sick!. In this weekends Belgian GP Mark Webber’s race was ruined by another harsh decision to give him and ‘the real F1 fans’ a drive through penalty?. No one died and if it was down to me – the racing takes priority and Webber would have had no penalty what-so-ever. These young…and in some cases ‘older men’ are racing drivers not girl guides…this is GP racing not ‘The Teddy Bears Picnic’ for crying out laud!.
Some of these jobs worth stewards want to have a go at driving an F1 car before making their woolly headed judgments on these brave drivers. Autosport featured an article about a 1970’s Belgian GP in which a driver called David Purley took part. This driver was awarded the Gorge Medal after parking his F1 car in the Dutch GP of 1973. The reason he parked it was so he could go and try to save a fellow racer from the burning wreck of his over-terned F1 car. The flames were to fears and despite burning himself Purely could nothing for his colleague. This, Mr FIA cop, is what an F1 driver is. He is a brave fearless hero!. Not a cheat, a liar, or any other derogatory label that you cast upon them with your money making red-tape decisions!.
These ‘people’ make me so angry!, SO ANGRY!…i could THROW THE PHONE DOWN!.
S. (Mr angry)
Alonso is the best by far anyway… most people are just jealous
I’ve already posted this on the F1 Fanatic website, but thought I’d post it here too.
Apologies in advance for this long post, but I recalled seeing someone saying that this was mentioned in ‘The Official Formula 1 Season Review 2008’ and I was just sorting through some books and thought I’d glance at my copy. I haven’t read through the entire book but coincidentally, the book opened at this page (I swear – scary!!!). This is what was written:
“TALKING POINT WAS ALL AS IT SEEMED
Although nobody wanted to be too outspoken on the record, many teams were deeply suspicious that Fernando Alonso’s victory in Singapore, the first of the year for Renault, had been choreographed, with Nelson Piquet Jr crashing at an opportune moment to trigger the safety-car period that swung the race towards Alonso.
Alonso had been quick from Friday’s first free practice and was deeply unhappy when a fuel-feed problem afflicted him early in Q2, before he’d had a chance to set a time. Starting only 15th on the bumpy Singapore street circuit, where overtaking was doubly difficult, his prospects were not promising. Piquet Jr had not made it out of Q1.
Normally, faced with Alonso’s situation, a team will fuel up and run a long first stint one stopper in an attempt to make up track position on some of the two-stopping cars and those one-stoppers with shorter stints. To go aggressive on strategy will only work on a circuit where overtaking is particularly easy and you have good top-end engine performance. Neither applied to Renault at Singapore’s spectacular Marina Bay circuit and Alonso said they did it because the brakes were running hot all weekend and would not cope with a heavy one-stop fuel load.
Alonso’s first stop, on lap 12 of the 61, was very early. On the next lap, team-mate Piquet Jr, who had already spun on the warm-up lap, received a radio instruction: “Push, Nelson!” At the time, he was going nowhere fast, stuck down in 16th position behind Barrichello’s Honda from the start. Was this a coded instruction? On the very next lap, Piquet Jr gyrated into the wall and brought out the safety car.
Rosberg and Kubica were forced to pit under the safety car, as they would otherwise have run out of fuel, attracting driver-through penalties as a result of this year’s safety-car regulations. It proved that the first scheduled stints by anyone other than Alonso had been to pit on laps 14 and 15. Most teams have a very good handle on when the opposition are going to stop, so Alonso’s lap-12 stop was both as early as it legitimately could be and as late as possible if any ‘plan’ was to work.
“Looking at it from a purely statistical point-of-view,” said a rival team strategist, “on a track like Singapore, stopping on lap 12 is not aggressive, it’s stupid, It’s something that cannot work. Your grandmother wouldn’t do it… Then, it’s true that stopping on lap 12 is the only way to open up a two-lap gap when the safety car will benefit only one car – the one that has stopped. And then, when you create this two-lap window and in it your team-mate crashes… If you add up the probability, you end up with a figure that is very close to zero.””
In light of the above, I’m surprised an investigation wasn’t carried out sooner.
Maybe this strange sentence (the last line) in Piquet’s “executioner” statement against Briatore now has a meaning:
“Anyone who knows my history knows that the results I am having in F1 do not match my CV and my ability. The conditions I have had to deal with during the last two years have been very strange to say the least – there are incidents that I can hardly believe occurred myself,”