Briatore is back – but was he ever really gone?

The announcement that Flavio Briatore assumed team principal responsibilities at Alpine following the unexpected resignation of Oli Oakes superficially marks the completion of his return to the forefront of Formula 1. The reality is, he was never really gone even amid the fallout of the revelation that Nelson Piquet Jr crashed deliberately to trigger a safety car that allowed Renault team-mate Fernando Alonso to win the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix.

That happened on Briatore’s watch as team principal of the same Enstone-based team that is now Alpine. And much as it was misguided of Renault Group CEO Luca de Meo to appoint him as “executive advisor” to the F1 project last year given his history, there was nothing to prevent it. From the moment Briatore became involved in the team, it was clear who was calling the shots when it came to the big picture. While Oakes was the detail man, Briatore set the team’s direction. And that will continue even after the latest change, potentially with a new team principal coming in down the line.

When Briatore first became involved in F1 as Benetton’s commercial director at the start of 1989, he’d only once even attended a grand prix. That was the final race of 1988 in Australia. He was dismissed by many as just another short-term poseur, a playboy money man who would come and go. That early evaluation proved wide of the mark. He not only endured in F1, but became part of the texture of motorsport at the highest level and its foothills for decades. What’s more, he twice led the team to the top of F1, with Michael Schumacher in 1994-5 and, under the Renault name, with Fernando Alonso in 2005-6. Nobody saw that coming when he arrived.

Initially, it was a short-term appointment. He was tasked with building up the team's commercial and financial infrastructure, lacking even after Benetton bought the Toleman team in 1985 ahead of renaming it eponymously the following year. Briatore had become involved with Benetton after meeting co-founder Luciano Benetton, who brought him on board despite his checkered history. He was a key part of Benetton’s aggressive expansion, particularly in the United States. 

In Damien Smith’s must-read book about the team – Rebels of Formula 1 – Briatore lays out his view of the Benetton F1 team when he joined.

“Originally I only stayed in England for three or four months to set up the commercial department, because other than Benetton there were no other sponsors,” Briatore is quoted as saying. “The people there had no idea, no presentation, nothing.”

However, the team did have great potential in terms of personnel such as Rory Byrne, Pat Symonds, and Alan Permane, who would go on to become well-known in F1. It wasn’t long before Briatore took overall charge, which on top of bringing new sponsors on board, put him in a powerful position – something shored up by being given a stake in 1990. He also quickly established his reputation for being brutal with drivers, benching Johnny Herbert, who had been pitched into F1 by Peter Collins at the start of 1989 despite not being recovered from the injuries sustained in his massive F3000 accident in 1988.

Briatore came out on the wrong side of some contractual gamesmanship with Michael Schumacher, but outside of that his relentless deal-making made a huge impact at Benetton. Getty Images

For all that, what Briatore did with the team was astonishing. Benetton, which when he joined was only an occasional winner, became a standard-setter in F1 and turned from occasional race winner into dominant force in the mid-1990s. A consistent theme was Briatore’s ferocious deal-making. A classic example of this was misleading Michael Schumacher about the value of 1993 teammate Riccardo Patrese’s contract. That backfired when Schumacher paid Patrese $1 million for a glance at the contract revealing that, despite having a deal that meant his teammate couldn’t be paid more than him, this wasn’t the case. The result was a new deal that earned Schumacher around $20 million a year. 

While Briatore ultimately lost out there, most of the time he didn’t either for Benetton or personally. This has been the magic formula for Briatore – yes, he enriches himself, but in doing so he enhances whatever business he works for, and business partners, he works with. Such stories are legion, with the acquisition of the Ligier team making it possible to switch standard-setting Renault engines to Benetton for 1995 one of the most famous. An inveterate deal-maker, Briatore’s fingerprints were on everything the Benetton team did – and beyond in the wider F1 world – not to mention endless interests outside of that. What’s more, it worked.

It wasn’t a smooth rise to the top. The fallout with John Barnard (whom Briatore had recruited from Benetton at great expense) ructions with engine supplier Ford with the abandoned V12 project, and the battle to deprive McLaren of equal-specification engines in 1993, as well as the loss of key technical personnel to the short-lived Reynard F1 project, all made life difficult. But a key counterpoint to that was bringing in Tom Walkinshaw as a partner, taking control of the technical and operational side of the team while Briatore focused on the financial and commercial aspects. It was a great formula, doubly so given it brought Ross Brawn into the team’s orbit, with key Reynard defectors Symonds and Byrne also returning. He also pulled off a key commercial deal by bringing in Japan’s Mild Seven as sponsor in place of the wavering Camel brand, as well as moving fast to grab Schumacher from Jordan. Of course, this was also a time of endless accusations of cheating through the use of systems such as launch control – something, it should be noted, that the team was never found guilty of. Suffice to say, Briatore never approached F1 in the Corinthian spirit.

This was the Briatore model. He wasn’t a racing fan, he wasn’t an engineer and he pretended to be neither. Ask those who worked for him in successful times and they speak well of his approach of giving the technical team what they needed and butting out. The only time things became difficult was when the performance wasn’t there, and that made the post-Schumacher years difficult. Briatore himself paid the price, being replaced by David Richards during 1997.

But Briatore was still involved in F1. He set up the deal for Renault’s engine design to be used after the company’s withdrawal from F1 at the end of 1997, first under the Mecachrome name then Supertec (with other badging deals later taking place). It was lucrative, but not especially successful and there were frustrations that the development rate was inadequate. In the background, Briatore was working on a way back in, and it was he who brought Renault to the table to acquire Benetton in 2000 for $120 million. He duly came back in as team principal and set about taking the team back to the front. Along the way there was the trademark deal-making and questionable treatment of drivers, with Jenson Button and Jarno Trulli among the perceived victims. Of course, he also promoted Fernando Alonso – a driver he became manager of – but who could argue with that, given the incredible success the driver brought to the team?

Then came the fall – Singapore 2008. Or rather, it came in the build-up to the race the following year after Nelson Piquet spilled the beans about what happened. Briatore was initially given a lifetime ban from F1 on the basis that he was “complicit” in what happened in Singapore. Briatore not only denied that, but also fought the ban – one that ultimately didn’t stand up legally. Briatore fought it in the French courts and it was overturned in January 2010. Although he took broad responsibility in his capacity as team boss, he denied being overseeing the scheme and effectively admitted no real fault.

Briatore was initially given a lifetime ban from F1 amid the fallout from Nelson Piquet Jr's crash at Singapore in 2008. The ban was later lifted, and Briatore never admitted fault. Elliott Patching/Getty Images

All of this means Briatore was never really away from F1, continuing to have businesses in and around the grand prix paddock. Even before the appointment to his current role, he worked closely with F1 and CEO Stefano Domenicali as a fixer and deal maker. While low profile, he was very much a part of the landscape.

The return with Alpine last year changed that, as to many fans he’d disappeared beyond his driver management dealings with the likes of Alonso, Mark Webber and more. While the team has consistently denied it, Briatore’s role appears to be to have a punt at making the most of the team on track in the short-term with a view to selling it. Given the price tag of F1 teams today and the number of interested buyers, that could be a lucrative deal for Renault, which owns 76% of the team. And of course, that will be to Briatore’s personal benefit as well – as has been his way.

Briatore is a fascinating figure. While it’s tone-deaf and embarrassing that the Renault Group, of all companies, appointed him, it’s difficult to disagree with his abilities. What’s more, there’s plenty of evidence that the strategies of old are at play, with moves such as the sidelining of Jack Doohan in favour of Franco Colapinto – with the latter only on a five-race run subject to either producing performance matching or exceeding that of teammate Pierre Gasly or bringing in significantly sponsorship dollar. He’s also cut several hundred jobs, and convinced Renault to close down its F1 engine program in favor of becoming a Mercedes customer team next year. 

You can legitimately question his methods, but Briatore’s contribution to the team’s historic success and also to accelerating the evolution of F1 in the 1990s and 2000s cannot be overlooked. It may seem like sacrilege to some to say it, but he merits a place in the discussion as one of the great team principals despite being, in so many ways, the polar opposite of what you’d expect from an F1 boss. What’s more, he was in some ways an F1 visionary given he was preaching about the necessity of spicing up the show long before it became a preoccupation of F1.

In a way, he’s the perfect team boss for the time. Align your objectives with Briatore and it can be to mutual benefit, as many in the F1 paddock have realized. And as he showed with the Enstone team in his previous two stints, that doesn’t mean that he can’t lead you to success. Whether that’s the case with the Alpine iteration of the team, or even if Renault Group really cares, is up for debate. Supporters of Briatore will point to the strong finish to last season, but that was a recovery in motion regardless of his arrival. The bigger test will be how the team performs for the rules reset in 2026.

Love him or loathe him, Briatore has been a key player in F1 for almost four decades now and someone who has been unashamedly himself and unbound by traditional conventions of behavior. That makes him emblematic of a sporting competition that has become increasingly business driven over the years. You can question his ethics and his way of doing business, and the dark cloud of Singapore 2008 will always follow him, but what can’t be denied is the profound impact he’s had on changing grand prix racing – and his success as a team boss, at least in his first two stints in that capacity.

And that in itself tells you much about what grand prix racing has become.