Why the job title is irrelevant for the role that Briatore is performing at Alpine

Who cares if Flavio Briatore isn’t recognised as Alpine team principal? The important point is that he’s there.

You may not approve of the wild-haired man who gabbles in unintelligible English, but the controversy that surrounded him in the past is also part of his F1 credentials today. He’s been there and done it – in every sense.

Some of his methods may have been outlandish but, for a team losing leaders as often as Ferrari replaces one tacky livery with another, Briatore is as good as it gets. In some ways, he’s better than that.

His CV, covering world championships for Michael Schumacher (with Benetton) and Fernando Alonso (Renault), turned into a charge sheet when Briatore allegedly signed off Nelson Piquet Jr deliberately crashing during the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix.

The tactic (to trigger a safety car and help Alonso on his way to a victory that was rare at the time) was as clumsy as Piquet’s staged loss of control. Briatore received a lifetime ban from the FIA, the penalty being rescinded when a high court (in France, no less) cleared him of any involvement in an incident that has become known as ‘Crashgate’.

Briatore moved on to run a high-end fashion chain and a couple of nightclubs and restaurants. In 2013, I interviewed him over dinner at Cipriani’s in Monaco. He said he kept in touch with the sport and followed the races, but he had no intention of returning to F1. That changed in 2024 when he became ‘Executive Advisor’ at Renault/Alpine.

Briatore, baseball cap in customary style, led the all-nighter after Schumacher’s Suzuka 1995 title win

Photo by: LAT Images

This was nothing new. Briatore had said farewell to F1 in October 1997 after masterminding Benetton’s expansion from global knitwear icon to Formula 1 world champion. His departure received mixed notices; you were either delighted or saddened, depending on the manner in which your path had crossed the Italian’s.

I had got off on the wrong foot after Flavio sacked Johnny Herbert during the 1989 season. When I called on behalf of my newspaper to indignantly ask why, Briatore said: “Because he is sick. I have no experience of motor racing. But I see that every driver in F1 has two legs.

“Johnny has only one… if you know what I mean. [A reference to Herbert’s severe ankle injuries inflicted by his Brands Hatch crash during an F3000 race the previous year]. So, what do you do? Do you keep him? No, because it is a danger for him as well. That’s the way it is.”

Despite Herbert’s frustration and the British media’s outrage at the time, Johnny would later agree it had been a correct if – no pun intended – painful decision. His F1 debut had indeed been premature because of the substantial injury.

“It’s completely crazy. The teams talk about having 170 people doing aerodynamics. It’s not the drivers’ world championship. It’s the wind tunnel world championship. You are spending a fortune channelling air up and down, and this and that" Flavio Briatore

Briatore brought a new dimension to F1. It was called irreverence. The cap with the peak turned back to front, the year-round tan and the ever-present cigarette may have upset one or two members of the self-important establishment, but this trademark soon became acceptable to many.

The carefully palmed ciggy often got him into trouble. He countered that by having a smoking sign made for his pitwall pass; it actually worked on several occasions when confronted by bewildered officials trying to follow the letter of the pitlane law. (Had Mohammed Ben Sulayem been around, Briatore would presumably have been reprimanded by a press release no one could fully understand and retracted a week later.)

Briatore cuts a subdued figure today compared to the constant source of entertainment provided back in the day. I’m thinking of Osaka airport early on the morning after the 1995 Japanese GP. Benetton had just won the championship and the team, with Flavio leading the way, had been up all night.

You could tell that by his permanent grin and dishevelled state at first class check-in, the denim shirt hanging outside the jeans (a mode of dress yet to come into fashion) and the blue cap in its usual position.

Alpine currently sits 10th in the constructors’ world championship points

Photo by: Mark Thompson / Getty Images

He later took great pleasure in joining us in the coffee shop, then flitting in and out of the first class lounge, wherein sat the immaculately creased and pressed owner of a team that had not enjoyed a particularly good season. I don’t recall too many of us rushing to hold him back.

He feigned roguish innocence when I recalled this in 2013. He was less reticent about expanding his views on the basics of Formula 1 and its purpose.

“It’s completely crazy,” he said. “The teams talk about having 170 people doing aerodynamics. It’s not the drivers’ world championship. It’s the wind tunnel world championship. You are spending a fortune channelling air up and down, and this and that.

“OK, if you want to play around, you play around with the wings – like in our time. Now you have telemetry from the factory. This is ridiculous. You need to have 30 people in the factory supporting the race. It’s completely mad!"

“Look,” he continued, “nobody outside the teams cares. They [F1] talk about engines and the importance of linking with road cars. When we won a championship, nobody asked how many cylinders we had. All they wanted to talk about was the spettacolo through the race.

“If it costs a team $50,000 or $100million, the spectator doesn’t care. OK, the income a team has is very important. But however much money you get, you spend. If you tell people the budget is 10, the next day it is already spent.”

I don’t know if Briatore holds similar views today. But I can’t say I disagree with him now any more than I did then – regardless of the title he may or may not have.

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‘Mansell moustache’ japery with Jean Alesi at the 1995 Australian Grand Prix in Adelaide

Photo by: Sutton Images