One can understand Felipe Massa’s point of view. He was leading the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix, a race he needed to finish well in order to close a six-point gap on World Drivers’ Championship leader Lewis Hamilton. Then, Nelson Piquet Jr crashed in a pre-determined move to unfairly influence the driver order in favour of his Renault team-mate Fernando Alonso. Massa finished in 13th and would go on to miss out on the drivers’ title by a point.
Fifteen years on, he wants to be recognised as the real world champion.
A 2009 investigation ended with Renault being charged with conspiracy and race fixing, with team principal Flavio Briatore and engineer Pat Symonds eventually leaving the team having initially threatened to sue Piquet for his public proclamations regarding the team orders to crash his car to benefit Alonso.
Until now, nobody has really thought too deeply about the lasting effect caused by the blatant cheating in that 2008 race. Three events later, Massa was being pipped to the title by Hamilton, the Brit passing Timo Glock on the final lap in Brazil to claim the defining point of the season. But history would surely have been somewhat different had the Brazilian driver not being artificially demoted down the order back in Singapore.
Piquet’s crash came just after Alonso had pitted, and with the son of racing legend Nelson Sr needing to have his car lifted away from the track, the safety car was deployed. Under the conditions of the time, no driver could pull into the pits to refuel under the yellow flag, meaning that when Alonso nestled in at the back of the pack behind the safety car, he had gained a significant advantage on all those cars who still had to pit.
Massa’s race was irrevocably altered as a result, with his pit stop shortly after the race fully restarted becoming a catastrophe. The Ferrari team gave him the green light to pull away while refuelling was continued, causing Massa to drive down the pit lane with the fuel hose still attached and trailing along behind his car. While he eventually rejoined the track safely, he finished 13th and his failure to land a point potentially robbed him of the only world title he ever came close to winning.
It might seem strange that it has taken 15 years for Massa to claim that he ought to have been recompensed for Renault’s underhand tactics and the way it destroyed his tilt at the title, but it really shouldn’t have taken the Brazilian to force the issue. And if it is an episode which he attempted to move on from but has struggled to square away in his mind, why should outside forces decide that there is a statute of limitations on a feeling of injustice?
Just as Lewis Hamilton himself will probably go to his grave believing that the events of Abu Dhabi in 2019 did him out of a world title, nobody can tell Massa he wasn’t the justifiable winner in 2008. Sure, the final three races might have panned out differently had the resulted in Singapore been corrected, but Massa doesn’t deserve to have been left with the longest-lasting penalty for Renault’s acts.
In an ideal world, sports results wouldn’t be decided in courtrooms and boardrooms, but neither would they be determined by skulduggery of the type Renault delivered in Singapore 15 years ago. And who can blame Felipe Massa for wanting the record to be set straight given that the greatest moment of his professional life was apparently taken away by a clandestine meeting between Renault big wigs.
