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Felipe Massa has asserted that the fight in his lawsuit about the 2008 title contest is not with Lewis Hamilton but with what happened in the F1 Singapore GP that season. The Brazilian has put together a lawsuit where he is suing both the FOM and the FIA for their involvement in covering up the Crashgate in 2008.
Massa was involved in an intense title fight with Lewis Hamilton in 2008. The Brazilian had put together a strong season, and one of the races where disaster struck for him was the race in Singapore. He had dominated the entire weekend in the inaugural race in the country.
He secured pole position comfortably on Saturday and was on course for a win in the race as well. It all, however, fell apart for him when an untimely safety car induced by Renault driver Nelson Piquet's crash caused a panic pitstop from Ferrari.
The pitstop was disastrous as Felipe Massa left the pit box with the refueling hose still attached to the car. An almost certain win was lost, and Lewis Hamilton ended up gaining ground on the Brazilian instead of it being the other way around. This helped Hamilton ultimately win the title by one point in the last race of the season.
Years later, the then F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone admitted to a publication that the FOM and the FIA knew about the Crashgate but didn't intervene because the sport was still reeling from the Spygate scandal that had happened in 2007.
If the FIA and the F1 had acted on time, the title would have gone to Massa instead of Hamilton. The Brazilian is hence pursuing a legal case to be identified as the rightful winner of the 2008 F1 championship.
In an interview with Motorsport, the driver was questioned if he had talked to Hamilton since the process began. He said:
"To be honest, this is not a fight with Lewis. Lewis has nothing to do with this fight at all. The fight is about what happened in the race, which was not good for the sport. The fight is that this race should be cancelled. That's the fight." (translated from Dutch)
Lewis Hamilton's adversary not impressed with Daniel Ricciardo joking about the Crashgate
The Brazilian was also questioned about the Crashgate joke that Daniel Ricciardo had recently made in the Singapore GP after a disappointing qualifying. Massa acknowledged that while he understood it was just a joke, since he had been on the receiving end of the Crashgate he didn't find it funny. He said:
"Jokes are jokes, but maybe that's not such a funny joke. Joking about something that wasn't right for the sport is not so funny. But I wasn't there, I didn't hear the exact wording and I understand that jokes are jokes. But it's certainly not a funny joke, and of course it's not funny that it happened to me."
It remains to be seen what happens in the legal case. Will Lewis Hamilton be stripped of the title he won in 2008? Could this even be done retrospectively? These are questions that would get answered in due course once the court proceedings begin.
