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the Massa trial started this week, is Massa the legitimate Driver's Champion for F1 in 2008? Posted on October 30, 2025 at 12:57:38 PM by Adamantiumblue
Massa filed suit last year against basically everyone including the FIA over being denied the 2008 World Driver's Championship losing out to Lewis Hamilton by a single point.
The controversy surrounds lap 10 at Singapore, when Briatore, then running Benetton-Renault, directed Nelson Piquet Jr. (Maternal Grandfather to Max's baby), to crash his car and bring out a yellow. Alonso had just refueled a lap ahead of everyone else. When the safety car came out, the pits would be closed until everyone lined up and many of the cars were extremely low on fuel trying to push a one stop pit strategy. After they were lined up for the yellow and did whatever laps were required under the yellow before they reopened the pits (I don't remember the rules back then), it would be everyone going in at once given that they were all low on fuel and coming out in a chaotic mess while Alonso had open road. Two drivers (Nico and someone else) didn't have enough fuel, so they took the drive through penalty to come in when the pit lane was supposed to be closed. Most everyone else came in all at once and it was chaos.
Massa f*cked up worse than anyone, as he drove off with the fuel hose still connected and it broke off and he dragged it down the pit lane, and he dove in recklessly to the pit lane and a driver had to make an emergency swerve in order to avoid a collision. The FIA hit him with a drive through penalty he had to take for the reckless pit behavior.
He also skimmed a wall later in the race, but maintains that he would have finished in the points but for the Nelson Piquet intentional crash and the fact that Briatore got away with it when Alonso won the race as he had fueled the prior lap. Massa was, in fact, leading the race by 3 seconds over the second place driver at the time before the entire fiasco started with Piquet's crash on lap 10.
Hamilton won the Driver's Championship and had finished 3rd at Singapore. Masa finished 13th and a single point from 10th would have been enough to tie Hamilton and 2 points from 9th would have won him the title that season.
He remains pissed and a few years ago filed a lawsuit claiming that his son pushed him to do it and claim the title that was stolen from him.
Briatore was banned from the sport for years and only returned last season as some sort of official but not really official advisor and de facto team Principal for Alpine. He has a legendary history if you look back that included prior fraud convictions and jail prior to being involved in racing and routinely getting caught for flagrant rule breaking on a routine basis, but when Piquet admitted a year later in 2009 that Briatore ordered him to intentionally crash at Singapore, the FIA had to take action and he was banned from the sport (though he has returned the past season in a maybe I'm back, maybe I'm not type advisory position).
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