With the final conclusion of this year's 'Crashgate' scandal set to arrive in January, ex Renault Team Manager Flavio Briatore and former FIA President Max Mosley have become entangled in a public disagreement relating to events which took place at the motorsport governing body's Paris headquarters in September.
With Italian Briatore having received a lifetime ban from Formula 1 for his part in the race-fixing scandal of Singapore last year, the Italian verbally attacked Englishman Mosley this week by claiming that the FIA's decision was influenced more by personal vendettas than clear-cut evidence.
On Thursday, the retired Mosley - who has since been replaced by Jean Todt - issued an official statement, which included the following:
'Briatore should be the last person to complain that the FIA has not treated him fairly. The FIA has repeatedly given him the benefit of the doubt.
It did so when prohibited software was found in a car under his control (Benetton, 1994), again when a component was removed from his team's refuelling equipment (Benetton, 1994), again when his team failed to declare properly the purpose of a particular suspension component (Renault mass damper system of 2006) and most recently when they were caught with information illicitly acquired from another team (from McLaren in 2007).
By persuading The Guardian to publish sensationalist extracts from his Court submissions, without any mention of the other side of the story, Briatore succeeded in using that newspaper to distract attention from his key role in one of the worst and most dangerous examples of deliberate cheating in the history of sport.'
In response to this, Briatore has issued a fresh statement in which he relates his punishments to Mosley's own circumstances, adding that his non-attendance at the September FIA court hearing was due to a recommendation from the then FIA President:
'It is difficult to ascertain whether Mr. Mosley is just losing his temper while waiting for the decision to be issued by the French courts (an attempted overruling of the ban, with a verdict due to arrive in January) or if, after having lost his position as a key person in motor racing, he is just eager to regain media coverage by making provocative attacks against myself, amongst others.
I would also have been glad to hear Mr Mosley explain that he expressed to me over the phone on September 19 2009, that my presence at the hearing of the World Council of 21 September was neither necessary nor desirable.'
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