Ecclestone supports my Crashgate legal challenge, claims Massa

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In the round-up: Felipe Massa claims Bernie Ecclestone supports his legal action against FOM and the FIA

In brief

Ecclestone ‘supports Massa’s legal challenge’

Felipe Massa claims that Bernie Ecclestone, former CEO of Formula One Management, has voiced his support for his action against FOM and the FIA over ‘Crashgate’.

Massa began legal action after Ecclestone claimed the FIA knew before the end of the 2008 season that the Singapore Grand Prix had been manipulated by winners Renault. Nelson Piquet Jnr deliberately crashed his car during the race in order to cause a Safety Car period which his team mate Fernando Alonso benefited from. A botched pit stop for Massa cost him vital points and he lost the world championship to Lewis Hamilton at the end of the season.

“For sure we are fighting because of something that wasn’t fair, because of what happened,” Massa said. “What I’m definitely looking for is to be recognised – recognised as a champion because I deserve it. It wasn’t fair what happened to me, because of something that happened in the race and is not part of the sport. That’s why I’m fighting, and I’m definitely fighting to the end.”

Asked if he spoken to Ecclestone about the challenge, Massa said: “Yes. He said I was right to go to court.”

Crawford remaining at DAMS

Aston Martin junior driver Jak Crawford will remain at DAMS for a third year in Formula 2 in 2025, the team has announced.

The 19-year-old moved from Hitech to DAMS for his second full season in F2 this year. He currently sits fifth in the championship with a single race victory in the Barcelona sprint race.

“We’ve still got two rounds of this season to go as we’re pushing for a top-five finish, and I hope that we can take a further step forward next year, to be challenging more regularly at the front,” he said. “I can see how determined everyone in the team is to compete further up the grid, which is why I’ve decided to stay for a second year.”

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Comment of the day

Would reducing the number of available tyre compounds in Pirelli’s F1 range be a positive thing for the sport? No, argues NoelyNoel

Reducing the number of tyre compounds from five to three, while saving on costs of transporting hundreds of tyres around the world, could have profound unwanted effects, especially on tracks with high tyre degradation, like Silverstone or circuits with rougher surfaces and aggressive kerbs. The current system with five compounds allows for better adaptability to varying conditions across different tracks, providing teams with more strategic flexibility.

If we reduce from five to three tyre compounds, some tracks might demand more pit stops due to higher wear rates, while others might favour fewer stops. This could potentially lead to less optimal racing conditions and force teams to prioritise tyre management even more than they already do, which could make some races less exciting from a performance standpoint. Drivers and teams already have to manage their tyres, meaning they’re not always going flat-out, something I personally would love to see more often.

The current system promotes competitive balance, as the tyre selection varies race to race based on circuit conditions, which allows for more dynamic race strategies. Having a one-size-fits-all approach could simplify logistics but at the potential cost of variety in the races.
NoelyNoel

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64 comments on “Ecclestone supports my Crashgate legal challenge, claims Massa”

  1. Happy Bathurst weekend to all my fellow Australians who’ll be celebrating.

    Hopefully not too hard, though.

    1. And to you @willwood. I have the TV coverage on already and look forward to the race Sunday with a BBQ with some mates and a cold beer or two!!

      With Massa’s lawsuit am I correct in that he is suing for compensation for lost income through not being able to earn money as an ‘F1 World Champion’ but he is not actually asking for the result to be overturned?

      1. In theory the High Court could issue a declaration that the championship was decided wrongly and that Massa was the “rightful” champion, however I don’t think that would be binding on the FIA as they are not subject to the jurisdiction of the English courts. So a monetary award is the most likely outcome, assuming Massa wins the case.

        1. Even more so I don’t understand people who insist massa should drop the money, who wouldn’t want an extra 50 millions if possible?

          1. @esploratore1 it’s mainly because they feel Massa is being hypocritical in his behaviour – he originally claimed that it “wasn’t about the money”, whereas it now seems that the sole motivator for Massa is money.

        2. drop the case*

  2. Maradona’s hand of god in the 1986 World Cup is similar to this. I’m sure it can be proven FIFA knew It was a hand ball before the final was played, and certainly video evidence since can. But does it mean England would definitely have won the World Cup if that goal was disallowed, who knows…. maybe maybe not. Sure would have been nice but it is what it is and Massa should just move on in this similar scenario.

    1. Massa would have won if Singapura race was cancelled like any rigged sport event should be.

      1. Miane & Hamilton the 2021 championship if the Belgian GP got nulled & so on…

        1. No that wouldn’t change anything as Hamilton would have also lost his points from the Belgium GP.
          Still the claim from Massa is redicoulous after so many years and looks to me he is a bit lost in time

          1. massa wouldnt have won that race, thus it would have had an appreciable difference in overall scoring that year.

            that said, the lawyers are just draining massa of his money at this point and destroying his reputation in the process. kind of weird karma for not realizing hes holding on to something that isnt real.

      2. Why would it have been cancelled? The only logical action would have been Alonso being disqualified, as with any time an F1 team or driver is found to have cheated via the sporting or technical regulations. That would actually increase Hamilton’s score!

        Massa only cares because Ferrari messed up his pitstop and then he had a terrible remainder of the race, otherwise he wouldn’t care in the slightest.

        1. matt90, as you say, normally the punishment would be directed solely at those who would have been responsible for it, rather than going for an option that also punishes every single innocent party that was involved in that race.

        2. The problem in this specific case is that the allegation involves at least one senior FIA deliberately failing to bring justice when it had been in its scope to do so. That changes it from “the ref made a bad call” to “possible corruption”. And “possible corruption” generally means the beneficiaries of the corruption – which would include the FIA in that case, as it ducked the reputational damage from such a plot being revealed during the title fight – would be penalised.

          The moment the FIA becomes one of the guilty parties, it loses the right to lock down its result – and then it’s the mercy of the court to decide how the championship is decided.

          (The FIA is bound to the French civil/criminal court for anything not bound by arbitration. If the FIA is found to have behaved corruptly in the British court, the French civil court may well follow through because that would take the matter out of the Swiss Court of Arbitration’s hands (corruption is outside its jurisdiction), and for that matter will likely want to know why the FIA did not reveal this when Flavio Briatore’s and Pat Symonds’ initial appeals against the FIA’s paddock ban went to the French court back in 2010-2011.

          1. “The problem in this specific case is that the allegation involves at least one senior FIA deliberately failing to bring justice when it had been in its scope to do so”

            Sorry but this is naive nonsense.

            If this is true every ‘refereeing’ decision that has been proven to be wrong needs to be overturn and as that’s about 50 per weekend in the English Football League only, then that’s going to be a lot of reallocating of points.

            My footie team had three apologies for penalty decisions that cost us 7 points – which is what we missed out on for automatic promotion. Maybe we should sue?

            No this is just ridiculous of Massa. And as i’ve said before I can imagine Bernie encouraging him, whilst he strokes his cat in classic Blofeld style.

    2. Problem with games is the rules if the game is over you get a tempory result which after a certain time described in the rules result get definitive. With football the refree has the final decision (was before VAR) after consuling his linesmen after that it’s permant..
      So the Hand of God and the Goal of England against Germany in 1966 was bad but there was no VAR so the refree decides.

      Massa knew this at the end of the year but didn’t do anything with it so he accept the results. That things gets biggers doesn’t matter the only thing he can do is a case for lost revenu (damages) the normal things with that. But sportive results should be no toughed.

      That is what strange was with the Tour the France when they removed Amstrong from the results with what they did if they test all samples of all riders i think almost every rides used something which wasn’t possible to detect back then but now easy.

      1. @macleod He couldn’t do anything about it because key information was withheld from him. That is public knowledge since mid-2009. This court case is based on knowledge only revealed this May, that changed it from a bad ref call to something allegedly far more serious.

        1. @alianora-la-canta Public knowledge is mostly slower the information in the Paddock. What I heard (also from Massa) they knew this before the public knew and we (public) knew at the end of the year…
          You could say he didn’t had the proof but he should protested even if they throw it out the information later would reverse that .. maybe

          But at the end we the result were final and that is very hard to change…

    3. José Lopes da Silva
      12th October 2024, 10:34

      Football games were not subject to revision in case of referee error.
      We could was well give the 1966 World Cup to Germany.

      1. Worse, even when referees make the right decision, justice isn’t necessarily done. The most famous football example for me is Suarez saving the ball from going in the net in the Uruguay versus Ghana match in the 2010 World Cup quarter final. In the final minute of extra time. Suarez gets sent off, a penalty is given, but the Ghanaian player Gyan hits the crossbar and Uruguay go through, Suarez smirking away on the sideline.
        In that case, Ghana had no time to remedy the situation. The problem in most of the examples, including Singapore 2008, is that were the race results altered after the race (as they did with Spa 2008 after all) or even cancelled, the rest of the season would pan out differently – and not just Massa vs. Hamilton but all the other teams fighting for points and positions. Cancelled 16 years later, nobody can do anything. And any such decision would simply create more ‘injured parties.’
        Crashes occur all the time in Formula 1. Teams have cheated many times. Those issues are dealt with (a) as a normal part of F1 racing that teams have to respond to as best they can and (b) penalties for the offending teams/drivers. I don’t think Massa stands any chance of being declared 2008 champion. But even a monetary payoff seems wrong to me. All the other teams and drivers were affected by the Renault scheme to get Alonso a win and its aftermath. Massa has no claim to exceptionality.

        1. Worse, even when referees make the right decision, justice isn’t necessarily done. The most famous football example for me is Suarez saving the ball from going in the net in the Uruguay versus Ghana match in the 2010 World Cup quarter final. In the final minute of extra time. Suarez gets sent off, a penalty is given, but the Ghanaian player Gyan hits the crossbar and Uruguay go through, Suarez smirking away on the sideline.

          David the rules were followed making hands in the penalty box gives a penaulty there are many examples of that.
          Saving a goal by making hands doesn’t matter you get send off making your team weaker and a penaulty which is a 99% goal (Normal)

  3. Leave it!

    1. Deep breath Felipe….now hold it…now let it go…

    2. I see no reason he shouldn’t go to the bottom of this matter, unless people who insist letting it go are afraid of hamilton becoming a 6 times world champion?

      1. I see no reason he shouldn’t go to the bottom of this matter,

        This one has been run through so many times the issue is wearing out.

        The top and bottom of the matter is that Renault as a team cheated. Under the rules (then and now) that is a simple exclusion from the race. Annulling the race is not an option under the rules covering one competitor team cheating.
        From that point, you can:
        Option 1:
        Move every non-Renault driver up the race points by the appropriate amount (one place)

        Option 2:
        Leave the results as is, and no-one gets additional points.

        In either available option, Massa gains nothing as he was too far out of the points due to the seriously bad pit-stop farce for which both he and Ferrari are to blame.
        In option 1 Hamilton has two more points from the race and people have even less reason to be hating on Glock.

        1. Top and bottom of this is that the FIA has been charged with collusion, which affects the validity of all their decisions regarding the race.

  4. Someone ought to break it to Massa that that’s not a great endorsement.

    1. Hahahaha

    2. I don’t really know why Bernie is encouraging him to do this, but then that’s always been Bernie’s game. Sport is piled with injustices, nobody inherited Lance Armstrongs titles, they’re just ‘no winner’. I don’t know if Felipe wants a big cheque, or a big trophy. Whatever happens, he’s not going to be considered ‘World Champion’, if maybe only to himself.

      1. @bernasaurus
        I have to agree with you. Nothing will change, Hamilton is the 2008 world champion. Though, I personally believe both the FIA and FOM who knew what happened and covered it up shouldn’t get away with their behaviors. The best outcome is nothing for Massa and hefty fines for both FIA and F1 and a suspended sentence for the future.

      2. Isn’t Bernie in it to get his latest wife (or daughter or whoever she is) run a bid for FIA president? In that case it would be hugely beneficial for him to have the current president sit on a rather unfortunate situation in case Massa would actually win this court case.

        Overall it is such a sad case of a guy I saw a a real show of sportmanship with how he dealt with the whole thing at the time as well as diminishing the great feelings of his awesome goodbye at the end of his career in Brazil racing for Williams. SAD.

        1. notagrumpyfan
          11th October 2024, 21:37

          Isn’t Bernie in it to get his latest wife (or daughter or whoever she is) run a bid for FIA president? In that case it would be hugely beneficial for him to have the current president sit on a rather unfortunate situation in case Massa would actually win this court case.

          The problem with that theory is that Bernie is an accused party (or ‘defendant’ as it is a civil trial) in this case as well.

          It seems to be a simple case of Bernie stirring the pot, and Massa being lured into spending millions on lawyer fees in a case without merit.

      3. I think you do know why Bernie’s doing this. Anything that can make the sport look bad, suits his agenda. The fact it occurred under his watch, will be irrelevant to the average joe, who will merely say look what happened to Hamilton in 2021 and now this.

    3. @maciek It’s the relevant one, given he made the statement that made the case possible.

  5. Hopefully Massa’s lawyers have got that in writing. As the only living participant in the alleged Crashgate cover-up, Ecclestone’s testimony could be quite persuasive. However I still think the possibility of the 2008 championship being overturned is remote; monetary compensation is the best Massa can hope for.

    1. @red-andy there is also an argument that Bernie is neither a neutral witness, nor a reliable one, in this particular case. It says a lot about his reputation that most posters here usually don’t believe anything that Bernie says when he talks about other topics.

      Bernie has repeatedly talked about being a close friend of Massa and how he used his influence in the sport to secure sponsorship deals and lobby teams to sign Massa, therefore extending Massa’s career by several years. By contrast, he’s got a public grudge against the parties on the other side of the fence.

      Meanwhile, during the most recent legal trials that Bernie’s been involved in, the accuracy of his testimony has been repeatedly questioned. In the Konstantin Media trial, it was so bad that the judge openly stated that it was “impossible to regard him as a reliable or truthful witness”.

    2. Hopefully Massa’s lawyers have got that in writing. As the only living participant in the alleged Crashgate cover-up,

      Hmm, that’s news, I hadn’t seen the obituary for Briatore

      1. Briatore wasn’t involved in the FIA’s decision to not act on the information they’d received about Crashgate, which is the subject of Massa’s case.

    3. LOL!! Ecclestone’s testimony could be “quite pursuavive”. Really?

      Let’s not forget that if by some miracle Massa won – then they’d be others challenging that decision, i.e. instead Alonso gets disqualified and it makes no difference to the final outcome.

  6. Massa was already annoying and always complaining when he was in F1. I remember feeling relieved when he left and very disappointed he from time to time came in the news and on to the screen again (I vaguely remember he also left and then came back again?… or it felt as such.. in any case it felt like decades before he finally left).

    He is not very clever either since Bernies motive to encourage him has little to do with the case but more with Bernie loving the boat getting rocked in general.

    Whenever I hear the name Massa I see this image of his whiny complaining sad droopy face.. always complaining about other drivers or circumstances. Always feeling he had been done wrong somehow. He seems to approach his F1 career totally in the wrong way and doesn’t see he has a big Perez element… he has been kept in the sport way past his due date, like over a decade. If anything, he should realise just how lucky he was vs people that were way more talented but didn’t get a chance.

    1. Yeh he had his whole farewell at interlagos in 2016 and then rejoined the grid when Nico unexpectedly retired and Bottas went to Mercedes. I maintain that Ferrari’s dodgy lights and stuck rig would have happened at his first stop irrespective of when it was made so his argument is moot. At best, have Ranault excluded from the result and Lewis’ winning margin increases. Time to let it go.

      1. At best, have Ranault excluded from the result and Lewis’ winning margin increases. Time to let it go.

        That (excluding Renault) is within the rules, the version Massa is chasing is not.
        It would be nice if they did exclude Renault – then the haters can stop maligning Glock.

    2. He is not very clever either since Bernies motive to encourage him has little to do with the case but more with Bernie loving the boat getting rocked in general.

      It’s not like the prime mover in Crashgate has re-appeared in the pit lane is it?
      Oh! Yeah, so he has…

    3. I think a key technical reason Massa wasn’t very good was because he was one of the very last F1 drivers to switch to left foot braking, which was obviously the way to go. I think it was sometime around Silverstone 2008 he might have tried switching, but I’m not confident in that timing.

      1. Well, he was also famous for having zero idea why he was fast when he was fast or slow when he was slow or how to setup the car. This is is according to Rob Smedley himself who is extremely close with Felipe. Felipe though was extremely unlucky in 2008. Not just Singapore, but multiple other times like in Hungary when he was dominating the race and then boop…his car goes through no fault of his own.

  7. Nice-looking fitness center & I agree with the COTD that five as the total compound amount provides the best possible balance for all circuit characteristics.

    1. That fitness centre does feel so classic McLaren, doesn’t it!

  8. Biskit Boy (@sean-p-newmanlive-co-uk)
    11th October 2024, 9:07

    I feel sorry for Phillipe. He’s a nice guy and probably deserved to win the title that year, but he didn’t.

  9. It’s such a silly argument to claim he’s the rightful champion. Everything everyone involved did after that race was done on the basis of the results being as they were. Had they acted on the Singapore GP at the time and changed that result, then the rest of the season would have played out in an entirely different way. 3 whole races.

    1. @oweng Precisely, but ‘fairness’ for Felipe is a solipsistic little world.

  10. The only thing that can be “fixed” about Singapore is to disqualify the Renault team. Which is both fair and doesn’t influence the championship.

    Mosley and Whiting are no longer alive, leaving Ecclestone as the only other party in the cover up. So that will go nowhere. It’s too long ago.

    1. Mosley and Whiting are no longer alive, leaving Ecclestone as the only other party in the cover up

      Briatore is still alive.

      1. I’m sure Michael meant the alleged FIA cover up. What’s Ecclestone going to do? Testify against himself? “I knew and did nowt, honest guv.” Could FIA then take him to court for damages/tarnishing F1? Given Ecclestone’s track record in not wanting to go to prison (see under ‘Germany’) it seems verging on improbable. Briatore? Wasn’t he forever claiming innocence?

        1. Yes David. It’s laughable that Massa thinks that he has some kind of great support from Ecclestone.

      2. As @david-br notes, there’s two issues at play in this incident:

        The Renault conspiracy, of which Briatore, Piquet, Symonds and definitely not Alonso (cough cough) were a part. This became public knowledge after Piquet admitted to his role in the scheme in 2009.

        The FIA cover-up, which Ecclestone claims happened soon after the 2008 Singapore GP (during the season!) in which Mosley, Whiting and himself learned about the Renault conspiracy but decided to keep it quiet.

  11. So would Ecclestone’s support run to more than ‘good luck Felipe causing a huge headache for FIA’ and actually testifying? “He said I was right to go to court.” Hmm. Doesn’t sound that rock solid.
    Again for the millionth time. There’s no precedent for cancelling a race for cheating (which is, let’s face it, a not infrequent F1 team pastime). The solution would have been the points of Renault and their drivers being deducted. And neither does Massa get to claim he ‘won’ a race because he was ahead on lap 17 of 61! I know he was pampered by FIA throughout the year, including given a free win at Spa, but no. Piquet’s crash may have been engineered to benefit Alonso but in the end it was a race incident (SC) like any other that all the other teams had to react to as best they could – and Ferrari and Massa failed on that point.

    1. @david-br In this case, the party alleged to have cheated is the FIA. If the regulator is believed to have cheated in such a way as to break the result, cancellation is a possible penalty.

      Brazillian football nullified 11 match results in 2005 and ordered them replayed after two referees were found to have accepted bribes to fix matches. Since we clearly can’t replay Singapore 2008 (only 2 of the drivers in that race are still in F1!), replaying the match isn’t an option, but nullification is. Nullification of the entire result has also happened at the Noisring for a couple of races (albeit due to problems with drivers rather than officials), so motorsport has precedent for doing this.

      Chinese football stripped Shanghai Shenua FC of a championship in 2003 (without changing any results) because of match-fixing involving officials, from which the team happened to benefit. Boxing matches in London 2012 and Rio 2016 also experienced this. I think this is what Felipe wants to happen – he doesn’t seem too bothered about the outcome of Singapore itself provided he gets the title he no longer trusts the FIA to have awarded correctly.

      1. @alianora-la-canta Not exactly the regulator cheating, though, more a case of FIA allegedly failing to act promptly on ‘information’ (big question marks there on source, timing, proof etc.) that cheating had taken place.
        So how many times have FIA ‘known’ that a team has been rule-bending/cheating, especially over design elements, but only acted much later after the team won many points with the element in place?
        Like I said, I think Massa’s case is spurious and itself unjust to other participants. It mixes him being in the lead in Singapore when Piquet crashed and a ‘win’ for him (in his view) with the entire race being null and void, which it wasn’t. In other words, he’s using the claim he would have won Singapore 2008 as a moral argument for cancelling the race. If he’d been in 8th place on lap 17 of the race, nobody would be taking this claim at all seriously. True? Yet the idea that being in the lead on lap 17 is equivalent to a ‘moral win’ is absurd.
        If you want to see Formula 1 turned into endless bouts of litigation, then sure, back Massa. And Hamilton for 2021 after him. And Verstappen after that. And maybe countless other teams and drivers over points losses, career/corporate damage, lost revenue and so on for past or future FIA failures.

      2. I love your creative analogies. Problem is that there you’re going to have a hard time proving that the race was fixed – two of the key suspects are dead. Any kind of due process, involves those that are accused been allowed to defend themselves – let’s say they are found guilty, then law suits will fly in from their families with all manner of litigation.

        You’re probably one of those who think that Man City are guilty of the 115 charges, just because they’ve been charged!!

  12. José Lopes da Silva
    12th October 2024, 10:36

    What should we do about the 1981 Formula One Drivers Championship, according to Bernie Ecclestone?

    1. Is there any evidence suggesting deliberate regulator misconduct in that event? If not, Bernie’s opinion is irrelevant because the FIA’s regulation sealing race results would definitely apply.

  13. Massa is a dreamer. That’s fine, but not necessarily of much interest to the rest of us.

  14. Massa’s logic eludes me.

    Ferrari had a flawed pit procedure following changes to the release process, using lights instead of a lollipop IIRC. This was exposed in Singapore, so they were able to improve it for the following race. Had Alonso, sorry I mean Briatore et al, not cheated, then who’s to say the new procedure would not have have reared its ugly head at the following race, or some other race in ‘08? Or some other completely divergent set of events? This is the problem of a lack of basic understanding of determinism, cause and effect. You can postulate an ideal parallel universe in which Renault is not run by crooks and cheats, or include the arbitrary and self-serving stipulation that annulment of the event (for which we have no precedent) rather than a DQ for Alonso should be the remedy, but even then, you STILL have all your work ahead of you to demonstrate Massa would win the WDC, even in a fantasy world of your own creation. Bernie, of course, is sh!t-stirring. The argument seems to boil down to “but Massa was such a nice bloke, we should revisit this”. Also, I look forward to the torrent of subsequent claims if he were to get anywhere. The list of cases in F1 where someone was robbed of a fair outcome is incredibly long and many of them were a much clearer and determined case of cause and effect than this one. Start with Spa 08 and go from there.

    1. I don’t follow Massa’s logic either. Suppose, immediately after the race, Piquet had gone on TV and said “Our strategy worked brilliantly, I deliberately caused a safety car so that Fernando had the optimum pitstop”. The whole world woild have known, but what would have changed? They might have disqualified Alonso, but they would never have declared the race null and void. It certainly wouldn’t have been fair on the other drivers in the race to say to them “you all did absolutely nothing wrong today, and you raced a fair race, but all you point scorers are losing your fairly-won points because Renault cheated.”

      Am I missing something here?

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