Autobayng News Team
Edvaldo, I think Massa’s argument fails on three counts. One is the claim that the higher ups knew the race was rigged, has never been tested. The only evidence seems to be something that someone might or might not have said in an unrecorded interveiw by a man in his nineties, 15 years after the event, to a jornalist whose first lanugage was not English. Exxlestone was not speaking under oath, and the people who could corroborate his statement, Max Mosely and Charlie Whiting, are no longer with us.
Even if that first part of his case is true, the next part is that Massa claims it was known early enough within that season for action to be taken with respect to the championship. Again, we have no evidence which can be tested to establish that point. If Ecclestone said that he and Max Mosely were aware that the crash was deliberate but initially decided not to investigate it, it is quite conceivable that he was referring to the following year, when rumours started circulating.
Finally, Massa is claiming that the rigging of that race unfairly disadvantaged him more than the other competitors, and that point can be refuted immediately. Crashes, flags, safety cars etc occur in most races, and part of F1 success is the ability to work under pressure when someone throws a spanner into the works.Piquet didn’t crash into Massa, he didn’t block Massa’s pit box, Ferrari were under no more pressure than McLaren, but it was Ferrari who screwed up their pit stop and ruined their own race. Whether or not the Piquet crash was deliberate or accidental, at that time it made no difference to the actions of the pit crew who simply could not handle the pressure. If this was the only time in F1 history that a driver had driven off with the fuel hose still attached then we might think there was some argument, but it wasn’t even the first time Ferrari did it. In the Spanish GP, 2000, Schumacher pitted when leading, was released too early and attempted to drive away with the hose still attached, and injured two mechanics.
Finally, even if the FIA knew the crash was deliberate, and even if they knew that before the next race started, annulling the race would not have been the appropriate response. They could have disqualified Renault and moved everyone else up in the results, or disqualified Renault but left everyone else on the same points. Neither of these scenarios change the WDC outcome. They could have retrospectively disqualified Renault from Singapore onwards, and moved everyone else up in the race results, but again that simply increases Hamilton’s advantage over Massa. The only scenario that changes the WDC outcome is to decide that the Singapore race is so badly damaged by cheating of just one team that, for the first time in F1 history, that race is wiped out of the results, but for the next three races, the team that cheated is quite happily allowed to stay in the championship so that Alonso can take points off Hamilton.
