Briatore, by his own admission, barely knows one end of a racing car from the other. The 59-year-old Italian's speciality is marketing and deal-making, a trade he learned when working for Benetton at the height of the company's prominence in the fashion industry and before it bought the Toleman F1 team, for whom Symonds worked at the time. If Briatore did decide to influence the outcome of the Singapore race, he could not have done it without Symonds's specialised knowledge and experience.
The transcript of the radio conversations at the time of the crash, also made public in a leak unprecedented even by F1's standards of sensitive documents reaching favoured media outlets, gives the impression that Briatore, in a colourful outburst about Piquet's driving, was surprised by the crash. Briatore, an extrovert character, will have been aware that all radio transmissions are monitored by the FIA.
More telling is Piquet's message on lap eight when he asks: "What lap are we in?" A driver usually relies on his pit board to provide that sort of information. At such an early stage, with the pit stops some way off, Piquet should have been focused on racing hard as the race settled down. It was as if there was a more important agenda awaiting nine laps later. Only Briatore, Symonds and Piquet know the truth.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2009/sep/15/renault-flavio-briatore-nelson-piquet-singapore
