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Massa blames Renault for losing title last season
The Ferrari driver would have won the drivers’ championship had he scored just a point in Singapore
Crashgate just won't go away. On the eve of the Japanese Grand Prix at Suzuka on Sunday, the injured Ferrari driver Felipe Massa has questioned why the result of last year's Singapore Grand Prix - in which Nelson Piquet Jr crashed on purpose to allow his Renault teammate Fernando Alonso to win the race - has not been reviewed by the motor-racing authorities.
Massa lost out in the 2008 driver's championship to Lewis Hamilton by only one point. He had qualified on pole position for the Singapore race but was one of the drivers robbed of points when Renault pulled their stunt and Alonso, after a carefully engineered pit stop, raced through the pack to win the race.
If the Singapore result was to be revisited, and points reassigned, Alonso would become - in retrospect - the 2008 world champion.
"Everything that happened was robbery but nothing happened [in terms of] the race. The result didn't change," Massa told Brazilian television this week.
He described Renault's actions as "ugly" and said that those involved had not been sufficiently punished.
"I have seen a case of a football referee being paid for stealing a game and every game that he influenced was annulled. The team that was responsible was relegated to Serie B. I saw this in Italy. Juventus were relegated three years ago because they paid the referee to steal a game.
"But with us all they do is send [Flavio] Briatore home. I cannot understand this and I do not think what happened is right."
Massa, meanwhile, continues to recover from the fractured skull he suffered in July when a spring flew off Rubens Barrichello's car and hit him on the helmet above his left eye during the Hungarian Grand Prix.
He had hoped to make his comeback in front of his home crowd at the end-of-season Brazilian Grand Prix, but doctors have ruled that out. Instead he plans to make a gentle return to racing by taking part in the International Challenge of the Stars karting event.
Michael Schumacher and Barrichello are also among the celebrity drivers from Formula 1, Indy racing and stock car racing, due to take part in the November 28 event at Florianopolis. ·
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All well and good, but 'what ifs' such as this always remind me of Ruud Gullit's timeless rejoinder to such a statement. On being told that "If you'd been playing, Holland would definitely have won the World Cup," the Dutch player wryly noted "And if my aunt had balls, she'd be my uncle".