Felipe Massa is looking into whether any action can be taken over a race which contributed to his world championship defeat 15 years ago.
The former Ferrari driver was beaten to the 2008 world championship by Lewis Hamilton, missing out on the title by one point in a nail-biting finale.
Massa won praise for the sporting attitude he exhibited in defeat. It was a world apart from the conduct of one rival team two months earlier in Singapore. The tactics Renault used to win that race “violated the very essence of sporting fairness but also demonstrated a total disregard for the safety of others”, according to the FIA when it delivered its verdict almost a year after the fact.
The team’s drivers Fernando Alonso and Nelson Piquet Jnr qualified a lowly 15th and 16th respectively in Singapore. In an effort to get Alonso to the front of the field, Renault instructed him to make an early pit stop and his team mate was told to crash shortly afterwards. The plot worked: Piquet’s crash triggered a Safety Car period which put Alonso in the lead, from where he won.
Massa was collateral damage in the episode which became known as ‘Crashgate’. He had taken pole position and was leading when his countryman Piquet spun his R28 backwards into a barrier at turn 17.
In response, Ferrari summoned him into the pits, but subsequently failed to disengage his refuelling hose correctly. Massa’s car tore it from the tank as he left the pits. He had been on course to turn a one-point deficit to Hamilton into a one-point lead; instead he finished 13th and dropped seven points behind.
Since retiring from F1 six years ago, Massa has been the FIA karting president and now heads up the drivers’ commission. However he is now raising questions over how the governing body handled the Crashgate episode.
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There was speculation over what Renault had done at the time. One team member who was not part of the conspiracy even challenged Piquet over why, instead of braking when he lost control of his car, he continued to accelerate.
Despite this Renault went unpunished for almost a year. The FIA only began actively probing the controversy after Piquet’s father, three-times world champion Nelson Piquet, formally contacted the FIA nearly 10 months after the race.
Max Mosley, the FIA president at the time,…
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