The detonation of the Singapore race-fixing scandal completely overshadowed Renault’s on-track efforts in 2009, tarnishing the team’s reputation and forcing the departure of its two most senior staff.
To make matters worse, the ungainly R29 was one of Renault’s worst cars in years and never looked remotely capable of challenging for wins, although Fernando Alonso did his best to wring some results from it.
This was a truly horrible year for Renault.
It got nowhere near its goal of a title challenge, its star driver announced he was leaving for Ferrari, and one of Formula 1’s biggest ever scandals cost the team its two leading figures and left the shell-shocked employees facing an uncertain future.
Fernando Alonso began the year announcing that nothing less than the championship would satisfy him – which was justifiable given that he had outscored all rivals in the final third of 2008.
But the 2009 Renault was on the ugly side of distinctive, and its performance matched its looks, with early whispers from testing being ominous.
Team boss Flavio Briatore was stunned to hear of rival cars legally running double diffusers when Renault had been refused clearance to fit a (crucially) slightly different version of the concept, and was frustrated to have poured money into a KERS device that never really worked.
The system had a nasty effect on the car’s stability, and didn’t offer many benefits; when it was revived for Monza after a long time on the shelf, Alonso made a worse start with KERS than he had been doing without the power boost!
Renault still scored regularly, though this was more due to Alonso’s stubbornness than the car.
A double diffuser was hurriedly flown in for qualifying day in China, and Alonso rewarded the team’s huge effort with a front-row spot, only for the safety car start to ruin his aggressive strategy.
That burst of speed proved a false dawn – by early summer Alonso could only manage low top-10 starts however lightly-fuelled the car was, and that led to midfield slumps in the races.
It didn’t take long for Renault to decide that the R29 was a lost cause, the team halting development and focusing on 2010 plans.
Alonso still found amazing race pace in Germany to set the fastest lap as he charged from 12th to seventh, and stuck it on pole in Hungary... which was where the team’s downfall really began.
A fumbled pit stop led to a wheel being shed on the circuit, and to general amazement the stewards decreed that Renault had acted irresponsibly and banned it from the next race.
That punishment was toned down to a fine at an appeal, thanks in part to other teams rallying round in support – but another, much more damaging, controversy soon followed.
Nelson Piquet’s second season had proved even worse than the first, typified by the Shanghai performance that saw him qualify 15 places behind his team-mate and smash two front wings in a spin-filled race.
He was dismissed after the Hungarian GP – and responded by informing the FIA that he had been ordered to crash deliberately to help Alonso’s strategy in the 2008 Singapore GP.
The bruising saga that followed led to the departure of Briatore and Pat Symonds, who later received bans from the FIA.
Renault accepted the allegations were true and escaped with a suspended ban, but huge damage to its image, as sections of the media declared the scandal one of the most heinous crimes in all of sporting history.
Those left behind, now led by promoted technical director Bob Bell and Renault representative Jean-François Caubet, shut the furore out and knuckled down to trying to salvage some results.
On the day news of the FIA investigation into Singapore ’08 was first leaked, Alonso’s jaw-dropping speed on a massive fuel load had taken him from 13th on the Spa grid to a near-certain third, only for lingering damage from a first corner mess to force him out.
Then just days after the hearing, Alonso gave his battered team a huge lift in Singapore – of all places – by taking third place and dedicating the result to Briatore...
That was the last time even the double champion could squeeze competitive pace out of the unloved R29 though, and Alonso will finally make his long-rumoured Ferrari move next year.
Ironically, the only effect of sacking Piquet was to trigger an incendiary scandal that came close to destroying the team, for the performance of the second car was little better, and often even worse, with replacement Romain Grosjean at the wheel.
Unfortunately, Grosjean – who had looked such a brilliant prospect in Formula 3 and GP2 – joined the team as its performance declined and the Singapore saga overwhelmed it.
It was an impossible situation for a debutant with scant Formula 1 mileage behind him, but even so his lack of speed and predilection for errors (even inadvertently replicating Piquet’s now infamous Singapore crash!) was a major disappointment.
It’s hard to see where Grosjean’s career goes from here, and the Renault F1 team’s fate isn’t certain yet either.
It assured the FIA that it intended to continue in F1 after the scandal, and signed the prodigiously talented Robert Kubica as a very appropriate replacement for Alonso in 2010 – but in recent weeks the noises coming out of France have been a bit too equivocal for comfort, and the odds on a Renault pull-out either before or after next season have shortened.
If Renault does follow Honda, BMW and Toyota through the exit door, let’s hope it finds a suitable buyer that will give its beleaguered staff a chance to get this once-great team back on its feet.
Highlight: Third place in Singapore was a vindication and a huge relief for the remaining staff, but hard to really celebrate in the circumstances.
Lowlight: The emergence of the Singapore 2008 scandal.
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