Fancy going along to a public execution? There’s one about to happen at Place de la Concorde in central Paris today. It’s been a bit quiet for 200 years, now that the Terror and the French Revolution are dead and buried. But Formula One is bringing back the time-honoured custom for one day only. Its presiding body, the FIA (based in Place de la Concorde), will be judge and jury and it is Team Renault that will be hung out to dry.
Renault, it will be recalled, is at the centre of probably the worst example of sports chicanery ever exposed – which is saying quite something where Formula One and its track-record of multiple scandals is concerned. Briefly, Renault has admitted it manipulated the outcome of a Grand Prix race by causing one of its drivers, Nelson Piquet Jnr, to crash his vehicle in order that team mate Fernando Alonso might win the race. Team Renault supremo Flavio Briatore, the principal conspirator, has already got the chop, as has his number two, Pat Symonds, director of engineering. Now all we are waiting to find out is whether Renault will receive a crippling fine (well over the last ceiling of $100m) or actually be banned from the circuit.
Some might argue that whatever is decided today by the hanging jury, it won’t be enough. After all Briatore & Co were knowingly risking the lives not only of their own driver but those of others on the track. Shouldn’t criminal charges also be in the offing?
Whichever way you look at it, Crashgate could not have come at a worse time. The horrendously expensive sport is strapped for cash as never before. It is already struggling to fill the grid now that the likes of BMW have withdrawn. With Renault out, or at very least its reputation irredeemably damaged, who else is going to bother pouring billions of dollars into this discredited sport?
Come to think of it, current sponsors must be feeling pretty sick, and none one more so than ING, the financial services conglomerate whose moniker presently prefixes the name of Team Renault in all the headlines.
Now what was the logic of ING’s unconscionably large financial involvement again? Ah yes, I have ING’s then ceo, Michel Tilmant, on the record on June 27, 2007 – just after he first signed his company up. Here are some extracts:
“We believe our brand recognition does not quite match the scope and size of our business…We believe Formula One can help raise ING’s brand awareness, and ensure that we are known as one of the leading global financial institutions. …We see our F1 sponsorship as complementary to our other sponsorship, but very much in the lead to position our business globally.”
Apparently, Tilmant and his top team “conducted extensive research” into which sports would best offer ING a global audience, including “football, the Olympics and tennis amongst others” but ”F1 was the best choice. It offered an unrivalled blend of a large global audience, with a profile that closely matched the needs of our business.”
Sounds as if you made the wrong call, mate. You should have stuck to boring old tennis or the Olympics. At least they are fairly clean.
As it happens, we can see an unflattering similarity between high-rolling finance and F1 all too clearly – but not in the way Tilmant will have intended when he signed away all those shareholders dividends on the deal. Let’s have a look at that parallel a little more closely. Both communities, banking and top motor racing, suffer from a surfeit of testosterone and are suicidally competitive – which makes them “reckless” with the rules when they think they can get away with it. Both are ludicrously overpaid for what they do – in the highest echelons that is – and are adept at finding new ways of enriching themselves whatever the collateral cost. Both are bloated and have a dubious ’social utility’ (to use FSA chief Lord Turner’s phrase).
Any other parallels I may have forgotten? Probably.
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