Felipe Massa thinks he was robbed of last year’s Formula 1 world championship by Nelson Piquet’s deliberate crash in the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix.
Speaking for the first time since it was confirmed that Piquet crashed on purpose in Singapore last year to help team-mate Fernando Alonso win, Massa has not held back in his belief that the result of last year’s title should change.
Massa was leading the race before Piquet’s crash brought out a safety car where a botched pitstop by Ferrari cost him any chance of a points finish. In the end he lost the world title by a single point.
“All of what happened was robbery – but regarding the race nothing has happened, the result remains the same. This is not right,” Massa said in an interview with Globo television in Brazil. “The robbery changed the outcome of a championship and I lost (the title).”
Massa believes that F1 should have followed the example of football, where matches that have been fixed have been declared null and void.
“I have seen in football how a referee took money to throw a game and all the suspect results were annulled,” said Massa. “In Italy, Juventus were relegated. But here they just sent Briatore home. I don’t get it and I don’t think it was right.”
Massa believes Piquet would struggle to find his way back to F1, as he reckons it wrong for the Brazilian to have come forward about what he did only after he was dropped by the team.
“In general it was a very ugly attitude for a team to come up to you and say that you have to crash in order to renew your contract,” he said. “A driver who knew he was going to be fired.
“Nelsinho knew he was going to be fired. I believe that admitting a mistake is a good thing, because the guy told the truth. He shouldn’t have waited so long to tell the truth. He told [the truth] because he was fired, this is not cool.
“He is in a very difficult position in Formula 1. You can be certain that if someone from a team says, ‘Let’s hire Nelsinho’, it won’t go down well. I don’t think I would do this. I think that I would have to think very hard about it [and] I think that I wouldn’t be able to do it.”
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