Buzzin Motor Sport

Sulky billionaire Renault team boss Flavio Briatore has constantly been making motorsport UK headlines during the last week or so, with verbal attacks on the Brawn GP team and it’s drivers, despite the FIA passing the controversial double-decker diffuser used by Brawn as being perfectly legal.

His personal attack on Brawn GP drivers Jenson Button and Rubens Barichello is nothing short of laughable, as they head the drivers championship after three races. Briatore referred to the championship as  ‘being fought between a driver who was almost retired and another one who is a good guy but a paracarro’, an Italian word for being as slow as a milepost at the side of the road, apparently.

Bitter Briatore is a man used to getting his own way, he has chosen to forget that he tried to sign the ‘paracarro’ Button this season for the Renault team, but now he is on a one man crusade to challenge the unity of the Formula One Teams Association (FOTA) by suggesting that the Brawn team should not be given a share of TV money.

As a new team Brawn are not automatically entitled to a slice of the TV rights pay out, but in a meeting last month an agreement was made by FOTA that the teams would stand united and give Brawn GP the right to their share the money in an effort to help out the newly formed team. At that point of course it was unthinkable that the new outfit would take the season by storm, or indeed throw F1 into controversy over it’s interpretation of the sports ambiguously worded new rules.

In the latest motorsport news, FOTA chairman Martin Whitmarsh has tried to calm the stormy waters kicked up by Briatore, he says there is a meeting scheduled by FOTA after the race in Bahrain where a call for calmness amongst the teams will be the order of the day.

“At the moment we’ve undertaken as a team to support Brawn, clearly, there’s a lot of support given by this team and Mercedes during the winter because we saw the importance of keeping Brawn in F1. It would now be hypocritical, because it happens to be painful for us because they’re competitive to not want to give them a proportion of the distribution under Concorde.”

Mercedes Benz Motorsport boss Norbert Haug has added fuel to the debate by saying:

“If they got a different interpretation of the rules we need to question ourselves – did we all influence the rules in the right way, were they written in the correct way and that is what we need to discuss in the future, I can understand Flavio’s position. But being self-critical, were the rules written precisely enough? Is that only an FIA issue? For me, clearly it is not only an FIA issue. It’s an issue of everybody involved.”

Clearly FOTA have a lot of talking to do to calm down Briatore and it remains to be seen if the group can once again find the unity shown during the pre-season.