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Thursday September 24, 2009

‘Witness X’ sealed Italian’s Formula One exit

A MYSTERY team insider dubbed ‘Witness X’ provided damning evidence that sealed former Renault boss Flavio Briatore’s banishment from Formula One, the sport’s governing body revealed on Tuesday.

Former champions Renault were handed a suspended ban from Formula One by the International Automobile Federation (FIA) at a hearing in Paris on Monday for fixing last year’s Singapore Grand Prix.

Italian Briatore was banished from the sport indefinitely while Renault’s engineering head Pat Symonds was barred for five years. Both men had already left the team.

In documents published on the FIA website (
www.fia.com), the world body said a fourth team member had also known about a plot for Brazilian Nelson Piquet Jr to crash deliberately at the race to help Spanish team-mate Fernando Alonso win.

The conspiracy had been thought to be limited to Piquet, Briatore and Symonds with the FIA declaring on Monday that double world champion Alonso had not been in the know.

However the FIA said a “whistleblower“, revealed by Renault shortly before the FIA’s world motor sport council met and identified only to FIA president Max Mosley and certain legal advisers, had also been aware of the plan and had opposed it.

The FIA said Witness X had been “personally present at a meeting shortly after qualifying on Saturday 27 Sept 2008 when Mr Symonds had mentioned the possibility of a crash plan to Mr Briatore.

“The FIA’s advisers were confident Witness X himself played no active role in the conspiracy and that, indeed, he had objected to it and sought to distance himself from it,” added the report.

The governing body said there was no evidence anyone else in the team had knowledge of what it called a “secret conspiracy“ apart from the four individuals. — Reuters

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