Renault To Remain in F1

It’s been a bad year for a proud race team. Renault’s F1 pedigree is one of the finest - both as a chassis manufacturer and as an engine supplier.

They stand alongside Ferrari as one of the companies whose history makes the very fabric from which motorsport’s history is woven. The ‘crash-gate’ incident in which Nelsinho Piquet was, allegedly, instructed to crash in order to gain the deployment of a safety car, had the potential to fatally damage the team’s reputation.

As it all panned out it was the heads of the Heads (Flavio Briatore and Pat Symonds) that rolled along the paddock like Alonso’s detached front wheel. Symonds maintains that he ’should have stopped Piquet as soon as he revealed his intention to crash’. Briatore has simply shrugged a lot and appeared with a succession of increasingly beautiful women on Mediterranean harbour-sides.

All in all the public perception of blame seems to have avoided Renault F1 as a team and focussed on the two now-unemployed perps – but that hasn’t stopped Renault’s board feeling the strain of the commercial embarassment. That was topped by the immediate withdrawal of two title sponsors - including ING insurance whose sponsorship of the ‘08 Melbourne GP gave us those wonderful F-ING MELBOURNE posters leading to the cars racing for the remainder of 2009 with hastily applied ‘Renault’ stickers in odd places.

Finally, however, Renault have announced that they WILL stay in F1 as a titular works team but that they will be selling 75% of their holding in the team immediately. It’s highly likely that the purchaser will be either be Luxembourg business man Gerard Lopez or ProDrive boss David Richards.

You may remember that Richards failed in his attempt to get a ProDrive F1 team onto the 2010 grid (even with the promise of Aston Martin branding for 2011) and that he has extensive experience as the founding MD of BAR F1 back in the days of the World’s Most Expensive Canadian. I seem to remember their #2 driver was a bit handy, too. Jenson something…