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KICKING AGAINST THE PRIX

Flavio Briatore interview
Arena, November 2007

THERE are few places so fascinating as a Formula One paddock, assuming that you’re fascinated by power, ego, money, vanity and insecurity. The paddock is the wilfully self-deprecating term for the enclosed, walled-off sanctuary at each circuit. The paddock is where the 11 teams of Formula One gather during a Grand Prix weekend, along with their guests, passing celebrities, sundry hangers-on, that peculiar species of young woman which resembles some ungainly cross-breed of girl and gazelle, and the media who conspire to make the contrived assembly of these people appear so seductive to the logo-encrusted fans who gather at the paddock gates and gawp.
  Status inside the paddock is denoted by laminated passes hung around the neck. These entitle the wearer to be at various specified locations within the racetrack at different specific times over the three days of a Formula One meeting. This weekend at Monza, where the 2007 Italian Grand Prix is occuring on a hot September weekend, I’m wearing a garish garland of three, plus a wristband. These makes me the object of occasional envious nudging and whispering among those wretched peasants draped in two or fewer, which is not disagreeable, but inevitably provokes irresistible feelings of envy and resentment towards those aloof aristocrats flashing more.
  All of which is even more ridiculous than it seems, because the real kings of this legendarily complex and unforgiving jungle, the alpha males who everyone here wants to be noticed by, shake hands with, get the autograph of, have a picture taken alongside, are those who have no need to prove their credentials to anyone, and therefore wear nothing around their necks at all. This select group, whose every step in the paddock is dogged by a small swarm of photographers, journalists and random leg-humpers, includes Formula One’s 76-year-old billionaire overlord Bernie Ecclestone, the better-known current drivers (who are, by definition, given Formula One’s vast global audience, among the most famous people in the world), and one or two other dominant personalities, including the man I’ve come to Monza to meet: ING Renault team boss Flavio Briatore.
  Briatore understands, perhaps better than anyone else alive, how to alchemise a base desire to do whatever you please and have as much fun as you can reasonably have into a sensationally profitable career. He represents a fount of knowledge from which most men should wish to sup heartily. Briatore has his own plane, helicopter, yacht, Formula One team, football team (QPR, a recent purchase), nightclub (Billionaire, on Sardinia), Mayfair restaurant (Cipriani), fashion label (Billionaire Couture), pharmaceutical company (Pierrel), Italian beach resort (Twiga), several homes including a Cheyne Walk apartment in London and an estate in Kenya, a bedpost whittled thin by notches representing globally admired beauties, and a Wonderbra model fiancee less than half his age. On the basis of Briatore’s media caricature as the archetypal Eurotrash playboy, there may be those inclined to disdain him as gauche, overpaid, over-indulged, and very possibly a wearer of deck shoes with no socks. It is unlikely, however that even such sneering detractors would knock back the chance to be him for a month.
  My opportunity to make Briatiore Yoda to my Skywalker comes on the Saturday afternoon, after qualifying. The interview takes place in the white-leather upholstered lounge of one of Renault’s motorhomes. It should be noted that “motorhome” in this context is several steps up from a Winnebago – it’s an office suite that takes up the entire load area of an articulated lorry. When I’m ushered in, Briatore is engaged in a farewell of handshakes and hugs with former Formula One ace Jean Alesi, who drove for Briatore in 1996 and 1997 when Briatore was running the Benetton team. Briatore is a burly chap, comfortably over six feet, with a disarranged spray of silver hair erupting from his summit. Alesi is compact even by the standards of Formula One drivers: the tableau resembles a child taking his leave from the grotto of an extremely well-tanned Santa.
  The potence of Formula One is rooted in its ability to reduce grown men to little boys, and I manage to gabble to Alesi that I was present at his only Formula One victory, when he won the 1995 Canadian Grand Prix in Montreal in a Ferrari, and that one of my favourite sporting memories is the subsequent press conference: asked why he’d slowed down dramatically on his last lap before greeting the chequered flag, Alesi had sheepishly admitted that his visor had become misted with his joyful tears, and he couldn’t see to steer.
  Briatore finds this funny: a good start. So I ask him how important that kind of passion is to success in Formula One.
  “Nothing,” he instantly decides, “happens by chance. Everything happens because you plan it. Managing a Formula One team, like managing anything else, has difficulties. But a Formula One team is more complex because everyone judges you every other Sunday, and you have to justify yourself every other Sunday, and push yourself to do better. But you put your personality through in the way you manage your team. When we arrived in Formula One, we managed in a completely different way to everyone else. Because if I’d managed like everyone else, I would have had no chance of winning.”

BRIATORE, 57, came late to the sport that, eventually, allowed him to be all he could be. Born to two teachers in Verzuolo, in Italy’s alpine north, he was an undistinguished student himself, but after charting a dilletante’s career path through his early 20s – ski instructor, restaurant manager, insurance salesman, stock exchange broker – he found form as a marketer. In 1977, his friend Luciano Benetton asked him to help with the US launch of the family fashion franchise. Benetton made Briatore rich, and Briatore made Benetton richer still, to the extent that by 1985 the company was in a position to buy out the Toleman Formula One team, and plaster its name on Pit Lane.
  Benetton asked Briatore to become the fledgling team’s Commercial Director in 1989, eventually appointing him Team Principal in 1991. Briatore freely admits to having known and cared little about Formula One – he didn’t attend his first race until 1988 – but then, as Benetton doubtless reasoned, there was a time he hadn’t known much about fashion, either. Benetton’s faith in Briatore was rewarded with two Drivers’ World Championships in 1994 and 1995 – won by a young German called Michael Schumacher, the cut of whose jib had impressed Briatore back in 1991 to the extent that he’d fired Roberto Moreno to make way for him – and the Constructors’ Championship in 1995.
  “I had no Formula One background,” Briatore concedes. “No motorsport background. Nothing. It may just be that the way you do your job is a little bit different because of that.”
  Formula One didn’t take wholeheartedly kindly to the arrival, and the success, of this cocky parvenu. When I speak to other people wearing the white, blue and orange ING Renault shirt in the paddock, two themes recur: one, how many of them have worked for Briatore for many, many years in a sport known for frequent turnovers; two, how relaxed and amiable they all seem, in a sport whose pressurised protagonists are not always noted for either quality.
  “He didn’t make a good first impression,” says Pat Symonds. Symonds, a laconic Englishman, is Renault’s Executive Director of Engineering. He was working for Toleman when Benetton bought it, and working for Benetton when Briatore first hove into view.
  “I first met Flavio 17 years ago,” Symonds recalls. “He came into a meeting room with some other guy, hadn’t been introduced to anyone, and sort of waved at us and remarked ‘Don’t worry what they think, they’re just engineers.’ Luckily, it got better from there.”
  Symonds stayed with Benetton after Briatore left Formula One in 1998, and was still there in 2000 when Renault bought the Benetton team, and brought Briatore back. The defining moment of Briatore’s second stint in Formula One was another startling change in a team’s driver lineup. In 2003, Briatore ditched the highly fancied young Englishman Jensen Button in favour of a lesser known and even younger Spaniard, Fernando Alonso. Alonso won the Drivers’ Championship in 2005 and 2006 – the youngest driver ever to do so – and helped deliver Renault the Constructors’ Championships of both those years.
  “The ethos Flav brings to the team is also quite unusual,” says Symonds. “There’s no blame culture here, and that comes from the top. He recognises that you have to work hard, but he tries to be as informal as possible – it’s all about what he allows to happen, and that’s the secret of management.”
  Asked for one memory that best sums up his boss, Symonds offers a vignette of surprising modest charm.
  “He may have mastered motor sport,” says Symonds, “but he hasn’t quite mastered the English language. But he’s actually got rather a good sense of humour, when he lets his guard down. A few years ago, I was sitting on the pit wall with him, and he mumbled something into the radio to an engineer. The engineer was very polite – quite unusual in itself – and replied ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t understand what you wanted.’ Flav replied ‘Don’t worry, I didn’t understand what I asked’.”

BRIATORE’S English is a stretch better than my Italian, certainly, but it’s a blunt instrument nonetheless. Asked to reflect on a disappointing 2007 season, in which the previously all-conquering Renaults have been buried by the traditional powerhouses of McLaren and Ferrari, he writes it off as “a transaction year”. Many of his responses degenerate into Italglish muttering. In seeking to understand the man, it may not be that much of a loss. His darting eyes shielded by blue shades, he nods energetically at the suggestion that he’s more of a doer than a thinker, or at least someone who thinks best while he’s doing, that he needs to be busy, that the concept of free time is something of a lost one, where he’s concerned.
  “Yeah yeah yeah yeah,” he interrupts, which he does often as a means of ushering a rambling question to a finish. “For me, free time is when you’re doing something you enjoy. Some people play golf. I like to be busy.”
  Possibly ingenuously, he advances this as the reason for his recent purchase, in collaboration with Bernie Ecclestone, of Queen’s Park Rangers.
  “Saturdays used to be really boring,” he beams. “I had nothing to do. And now we have something to do.”
  He maintains that Formula One consumes 90 percent of his energies, and that the actual racing aspect of Formula One accounts for almost all of that. His choice of outfit for the race weekend reflects this: the same team shirt as everyone else, tucked into a pair of jeans. He notes with perverse pride that Renault’s cheerful paddock set-up, while hardly unimpressive, is dwarfed by the portable headquarters of Ferrari, the size and colour of a Miami Beach mansion, and McLaren, a vast and forbidding silver and black Death Star. Nor is Renault overrun by celebrity freeloaders – aside from Arsene Wenger’s brief appearance in the pit garage during Saturday’s qualifying session, everyone I see at Renault appears to have a racing reason for being there.
  Everything else in Briatore’s portfolio – QPR, the celebrity-infested nightclub, the clothing range – he characterises as “hobbies”. But, I suggest, they’re not model railways. It seems to be important that the “hobbies” are successful.
  “This is the key,” he agrees. “I don’t like anything unsuccessful.”
  I ask if he could recall any noteworthy personal failures.
  “Not for the moment,” he shrugs, and knocks twice on the wooden table.
  Is success enough on its own terms, or does he have to feel like he’s beaten the opposition?
  “That’s fundamental.”
  Are there any opponents he especially enjoys beating?
  “Everybody,” he says, suddenly extremely serious.
  It’s not surprising that Briatore should exhibit a streak of ruthlessness. The two drivers who made his reputation as a judge of racing ability, Schumacher and Alonso, both also have a jagged edge to their talent. Schumacher was infamously unaverse to flouting the Corinthian niceties when it suited him. Earlier this season, Alonso deliberately baulked his current team-mate at McLaren, Lewis Hamilton, during a qualifying session. Schumacher and Alonso’s successor in Briatore’s pantheon of budding talent is Heikki Kovalainen, a 25-year-old Finn who seems, by way of contrast, calmly Scandinavian to the point of caricature.
  “He will be a world champion,” insists Briatore.
  I wonder what Briatore saw in Kovalainen, or whether he saw anything much at all, whether finding Schumacher and then Alonso was just luck, or. . .
  “No no no,” says Briatore, fidgeting with his phone. “Not lucky. You can be lucky once. Schumi and Alonso were both just. . . different from the others. You just immediately felt that they were someone very special. Everybody likes to hire experienced drivers. But we didn’t have the money to hire a Senna or a Prost, so we found Schumi, someone who could beat them. Nobody else had this kind of approach. And with Fernando we did basically the same. It’s like in any business, you get a feeling that something is a good deal or a bad deal. And it’s much easier to find a bad deal than a good deal.”
  I sit down with Kovalainen after qualifying. I ask how it feels to have such faith invested in you by someone with such a record for picking the sport’s next dominant driver.
  “Comparisons between myself and Schumacher and Alonso are nice to hear,” he smiles, “but I’m trying to make my own career.”
  A sportsman’s answer. It has been a rough first season for Kovalainen, though. Quite aside from having to replace a double World Champion at a double World Championship team, Kovalainen has struggled with a less competitive car and, at times, with his own inexperience. His debut, at the 2007 season-opener in Melbourne, was a shocker. He qualified 13th, and finished 10th, running wide and spinning with almost whimsical abandon: he could only have looked less like he knew what he was doing if he’d stopped to ask for directions. His boss’s public response belied Renault’s easygoing self-image. “If I say it was good,” thundered Briatore at the time, “I’m a complete idiot. It was rubbish.”
  I ask Kovalainen about the private response.
  “He is relaxed,” says Kovalainen, “but he is also very demanding. He wants you to operate at 100%, and if you’re not performing, he will give you, uh. . . feedback.”
  Kovalainen smiles. I ask at what level of decibels the feedback is delivered.
  “He’s just very straightforward. Doesn’t compromise, says what he thinks. After the Melbourne race, he came and asked what had happened. I said the car was difficult, and I’d made mistakes. He just said this couldn’t continue. He never yelled at me, never any of that kind of bullshit. He expects people to do well, but he’s never completely crazy.”
  Since then, Kovalainen has shown some of what Briatore saw in him, consistently outperforming his veteran teammate Giancarlo Fisichella. He declares himself another of Renault’s happy campers.
  “The atmosphere is important to him,” says Kovalainen. “If he sees someone – anyone – in the team looking unhappy, he’ll ask what their problem is. When we have a birthday party, he always brings a cake. And I remember once when the mechanics were working in the garage and listening to music, another team asked them to turn it down. Flavio told the mechanics to turn it up.”

THERE are, of course, the women. Like nobody else in the Formula One paddock, Briatore is known to people who’ve never watched a Grand Prix, and the reason for that is the women. He has been linked, to deploy the argot of the tabloids who luridly chronicle these things, with Naomi Campbell, Heidi Klum (with whom he has a three-year-old daughter), and an undeniably enviable collection of others. This year, he became engaged to Italian model Elisabetta Gregoraci. In the process of resentfully wondering what his secret is, it’s tempting to grumpily reflect that he has – according to most guesses – around US$200 million in the bank, and leave it there. However, women like Naomi Campbell and Heidi Klum meet rich blokes with their own planes all the time, some of whom aren’t slightly portly, grey-haired or middle-aged. If anyone knows how Briatore does it, it might be his and Renault’s Communications Manager, Patrizia Spinelli. Like many of the people closest to him, she has worked for him for a long time.
  “Since he started in Formula One,” she confirms. “I was working for Benetton Fashion in New York when he was asked to take over the Formula One team. I told him I didn’t know anything about Formula One. He said ‘Neither do I, but we’ll have fun’.”
  I ask approximately what percentage of the stories she has read – and denied, or ignored – about her boss have been true.
  “Less than 10 percent,” she says. “Maybe two percent. Same as with any celebrity. You know how it works – there will be a photo of a group of people in which he’s sitting next to a pretty girl. They cut everybody else out of the picture and print the pair of them. And then my phone rings.”
  Most of the time, Spinelli says, Briatore operates a policy of refusing to dignify stories with a comment, unless they might affect his business. The most recent, she says, was the teacup typhoon involving the alleged ejection of Bruce Willis from the Billionaire nightclub (It was reported that Briatore had Willis thrown out for refusing to pose for a photograph with his fiancee; the less entertaining truth, according to Spinelli, was that Willis flounced of his own accord after being unable to enter an area that was hosting a private party).
  Spinelli makes the reasonable case that Briatore simply doesn’t have time for most of the stories about him to be true. His days are filled to the minute, with a schedule maintained by his personal assistant, Rossella Potter, who was been running his diary for 15 years – another lifer. Spinelli’s own briefings with him rarely run over three minutes.
  “He’s very impatient,” she says, “and difficult to control. And has a very short attention span – he’s always thinking about something more important.”
  But something about him inspires long-term loyalty in his employees, and love from women.
  “He’s very generous,” she says. “It’s very rare to find someone who is so attentive, and is such a great host. He’s very good at making people feel at home. I know people think he travels from glamorous party to glamorous party with good-looking women, but he’s a hell of a businessman, and very clever as a motivator. That’s what people don’t realise.”

IT would require only the briefest attendance at the Psychology department at the University of Armchair to diagnose Briatore as a hardcore control freak. When he goes out, he goes to nightclubs or restaurants that he owns. When he wants to watch a football team, he buys one. While most people leaving Monza this weekend will struggle home in traffic jams embodying the Italian reputation for ruthless organisational efficiency, he’ll soar overhead in his helicopter. He seems, so far as I can figure, to spend next to no time in any environment of which he is not the master. How does he feel, I wonder, about the stuff he can’t control: the coverage of his life, and what people may think of him as a result?
  “I don’t feel it anymore,” he says. “So many people know you, it becomes normal. I don’t feel it anymore.”
  Did he ever?
  “No. I never cared. It’s part of life. Caring or not makes no difference. Better not to lose time thinking about it.”
  Or, indeed, talking about it. The office door is opened to reveal a trio of Renault mechanics with clipboards. A technical briefing. The next thing. He’s done here.
  “I’m happy if I’m successful,” he says, “and I’m happy if I’m not. It’s important to know what can be done better, but I’m never depressed if something goes wrong.”
  There is a pause, just long enough to be significantly uncharacteristic, and Flavio Briatore makes what may be the greatest understatement of all time.
  “There are,” he says, “a lot of people with more reasons to be depressed than me.”

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