Yes: Renault are the biggest cheats of them all

Why? Simple. Because it ticks every box on the cheating menu and, uniquely, it also involves the deliberate and reckless exposure of a sportsman and others to serious danger. There is no other episode in world sport that matches what the Renault Formula One team did in Singapore.

Let’s consider it piece by piece.

The scheme involved a conspiracy between three individuals who set out on a course of sporting fraud that made fools not only of hundreds of millions of people worldwide, but also of the 497 other people in the Renault team.

The plan to have Nelson Piquet Jr crash on purpose was dreamt up in the coldest of cold blood. We know it was first discussed after qualifying on the Saturday and was developed at a second meeting before the race on the Sunday. There was even a third consultation, when Piquet was told exactly where and when to crash.

The Renault plan was not the work of some bit-part players in the team, but the team principal, Flavio Briatore, and the director of engineering, Pat Symonds, the most important people in the outfit, who could not only be expected to set an example, but also exercise a duty of care to their young driver.

In every way it was premeditated. Piquet sat on the grid knowing that he was to embark on a course of action that was utterly antipathetic to the spirit of competition and fair play.

What is more, the scheme involved not just one act of deception, but was planned so as to engineer a secondary series of events involving another sportsman. Fernando Alonso, unwittingly, drove to an entirely fraudulent victory, depriving others of their rightful finishing positions.

At this point the Renault affair is already up there with Ben Johnson, nobbled horses and illegal keels in the America’s Cup. Where it lifts off into a class of one is when you consider the danger that Piquet was exposed to when he crashed.

In order to satisfy their sporting greed, Piquet’s seniors had set in train an event of violent destruction, the consequences of which they could neither predict nor control.

Piquet could have been killed or badly injured. Other drivers could have lost their lives, marshals might have been innocent victims and even spectators’ lives were put at risk. Which other example of cheating in world sport can match that? Link...