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Where to now for Singapore cheats?

Around the Singapore GP circuit there is bustle. Journalists cluster around drivers at media events, decorators put the final finishing touches to hospitality suites and the pitlane garages are alive with the sound of mechanics unpacking and assembling the cars for this weekend's race.

However for three men, that buzz and excitement is over.

Flavio Briatore's lifetime ban from motor sport is the harshest-ever punishment meted out by the sport's organising body. The FIA ban extends far beyond Formula One. Quite simply Briatore is not allowed to take a part in any FIA-affiliated sport.

Organisers have been instructed to bar him from any event. Any team or company that deals with him in the future would face losing their licence to compete.

That even extends to the drivers contracted to his management company. In recent years Flavio has had a nice little earner from the percentage of wages of drivers including Heikki Kovalainen, Fernando Alonso and Mark Webber.

The FIA has ruled that if those drivers don't sever their contacts with Briatore, they will not renew their Superlicences for the new season.

Not that Flavio will suffer too much. He made his fortune in the 1980s as a partner in the Benetton fashion group. He then with typical modesty, he started his own fashion label, Billionaire.

Last year he spent over GBP 68 million on his yacht Force Blue. Before marrying one-time Wonderbra 'face' (did anyone look at that?) Elisabetta Gregoraci, Flavio dated a string of supermodels. No, he won't suffer for things to do.

Meanwhile Nelson Piquet Junior may have been granted immunity from further sanction by the FIA, but no right-minded team will take him on after this - unless of course he comes with a large raft of his father's money.

Nelson Junior has been trying hard to position himself as a weak-minded kid who was brow-beaten into being the fall-guy, then blew the whistle to allow justice to be served. Who does he think he is kidding?

I feel if Piquet Junior had continued to race for Renault, he would have said nothing. The first conversation between his father and an FIA official came the day he was told, in Hungary, that it would be his last Renault drive.

That is either a coincidence as wild as the connection between pit stops and crashes in Singapore. Or cold-blooded vindictiveness to bite back at the people who had just sacked him. You choose!

There is no doubt that Piquet has talent, but he simply didn't cut it in the current generation Formula One cars. Throughout his career he achieved his ultimate pace by doing more testing than any other driver, mostly in teams funded by his three-times World Champion father. This year, with the ban on in-season testing his best result was a lowly 12th.

Among the 91 pages of evidence that the FIA have made public there is even a suggestion that Piquet himself suggested the accident, after Alonso only qualified 15th following a fuel pump failure.

That is denied by the Brazilian, but a mysterious fourth man, "Witness X", is quoted as having overhead the remark on the Saturday, directly contradicts Piquet's statement that it was Chief Engineer Pat Symonds' idea, just before the race on the Sunday.

The witness apparently said he didn't want to hear any more of it and walked out of the meeting. He did not know the plan was to be put into effect until the crash happened. It seems that it was left to Symonds, we guess under instruction from Briatore, to put the crash plan into action.

Symonds will serve a five-year ban, which given that he is now 56 years old, may mean we never see the talented engineer in F1 again. His next stop may be the USA where races are run outside FIA sanction. Or his garden in Oxfordshire, England.

Meanwhile controversy has surrounded the Renault car company being merely given a suspended sentence. I actually agree with the FIA on this.

The Renault company while bearing corporate responsibility for the debacle, had the wool pulled over their eyes just as much as we did. Nonetheless, the Renault brand around the world has been seriously tainted.

It should be remembered that through their junior formulas and young driver programmes that almost half the drivers on the grid were helped by Renault early in their careers. A more swingeing penalty could have seen all that come to an end.

Meanwhile, we have 20 cars, including Renault on the starting grid for this weekend's race in Singapore. Here's to a repeat of the spectacle of last year - with none of the scandal!

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