“I will sue to get my 2008 F1 title back when I was at Ferrari” – Corriere.it

The story is old. But recent statements have brought it back to the surface. The former Ferrari driver Felipe Massa is ready to take the FIA ​​to court to ask that he be awarded the 2008 world championship for drivers which he lost to Lewis Hamilton. The Brazilian was prompted to venture into the courtroom by the recent statements by former circus patron Bernie Ecclestone who admitted that he had not applied the regulation and that he was wrong not to cancel the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix. In that race Nelsinho Piquet voluntarily triggered an accident to bring a safety car onto the track in order to allow his partner at the time in Renault, Fernando Alonso to win the race. The safety car penalized Massa’s race who eventually finished thirteenth, while his main rival for the title (and then effectively world champion) Hamilton finished third.

In an interview with the «Motorsport.com» website, Mass he said he wanted to appeal “not for the money but to get justice”. «They told me that I could not appeal after the proclamation of the champion, even if it is proven that it is theft. At the time, Ferrari’s lawyers told me about this rule. So logically I believed in this situation. But after 15 years, I feel that the then owner of F1 (Ecclestone) had discovered it in 2008, together with the president of the FIA ​​(Max Mosley then died by suicide in 2021), and they did nothing not to sully the name of Formula 1. It is very sad to know that the result of this race had to be canceled and that I would have had the title. In the end, I was the one who lost the most with this result. The right solution is to cancel the result of that race. It’s the only justice that can be done in a case like this. We have already seen other similar situations happen in sports, such as Lance Armstrong, who was shown to be on drugs, and lost all titles. What is the difference?”.

However, it is not clear which court title Massa can apply to. The FIA ​​Sporting Code does not allow late appeals after a race and the right to request a review expires 14 calendar days after a GP and four days before the date of the prize giving ceremony. Fia of that year if the topic in question concerns the general classification. The only way would be to appeal to an ordinary court, but first of all we need to understand who has jurisdiction: Singapore? Paris (FIA headquarters)? A Brazilian court? Once the court has been found and admitted to being right, the FIA ​​should implement the sentence. But this precisely because it would set a precedent would probably only be the beginning of another legal path.