Briatore’s finest achievement

“You’ve got 20 minutes.” My heart sank as Patrizia Spinelli, Falvio Briatore’s right hand woman, handed the phone over to him. As it turned out, I got 50.

We covered a lot of ground, but what surprised me the most was when I pushed him on how proud he must be of the Benetton years. He turned instead to Supertec, the company he set up to sell Mecachrome V10s, the customer engines formerly known as Renaults that powered a number of teams after the maker briefly pulled the plug on its F1 interest at the end of ’97.

One of those teams was Benetton, which paid Briatore through the nose for the privilege having lost its Renault supply, to the tune of £17m a season – months after Flavio and the family had parted company. Briatore later greased the path to Renault buying  the team and returned  to the helm in 2000.

“I did my job in the  way I manage people and situations,” said Flavio.  “I survived in every situation in F1. For me, the miracle was Supertec. Nobody talks about that.  I put all my money from Benetton into that to sign  a contract with Renault. It was a risk. Not so many people do stuff like that.”

You’ll have spotted Briatore back in F1, usually near Fernando Alonso. ‘Crashgate’ has sullied his reputation, but he remains defiant. And the man who turned his nose up to F1 when Luciano Benetton first introduced him to the sport came around to it after all: “I loved F1. I have super relationships with a lot of people in F1. We brought something new as well. We brought lifestyle in, when everybody was looking at it from an engineering point of view. We did what Red Bull has done since. It is a copy of Benetton, no?”