Flavio Briatore: Career Wrecker?

[Mephistopheles]

RasputinLives
What did Berger bring to Benetton over Herbert apart from costing more money to hire in the first place like Alan Jones said one weekend Berger challenges for race win and another weekend he's way down in 15th or something

Berger was a massive pain in the arse, after he left Benetton I read an article about him in F1 magazine written by an one of Berger's engineers, he said Berger complained about anything and everything and was never satisfied, he stated that he and several engineers spent an entire day of testing just trying to get the throttle pedal the right shape they had to make and adjust about 10 of them before Berger finally decided he liked the one he had on at the beginning of the session.

He said nobody liked working with him and they would waste hours just fiddling with the tiniest most insignificant part of the car rather than getting the setup right...

Which probably explains why his results were so erratic....

 

[Il_leone]

Mephistopheles

Basically there were two Bergers in F1

Pre Mclaren Berger was tigerish and aggressive like Mansell and maybe too much sometimes. He was know to really throw the car around

Post Mclaren Berger - it seems like Senna sapped his confidence and the aggression was gone. His first thought at Mclaren was race 1 pole position not a problem handling Senna. He was never to the same standard as Prost and not really on Senna's pace although he did complain about how he had trouble fitting into Mclaren being so tall

It did occur to me if he was not up for it then he would not really try as many people noticed he would have 2 or 3 awful races and then now again prove he is a quick driver or he will have a poor qualifying then suddenly pop up with a fast lap in the race

I remember once he pulled his Ferrari into pits thinking it was not working until someone figured out he had a puncture so get back into the car

I could not understand why he was signed by Benetton ( Briatore) at all

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I should say Piquet Jr with regards to him... I have less sympathy given that there was every chance his teammate was going to be Alonso and from what happened at MClaren

What made Nelsinho think he would get a fair chance especially when Briatore was saying Alonso is a double world champion and everything should be done to accomodate him . Hardly the words of encourage for Nelsinho was it ?

He should have seen this from a mile? You might say it was his golden chance to be an F1 driver but surely the last person he needed to be his teammate was an angry Alonso who felt he was robbed at Mclaren

 

[Bill Boddy]

Strange that Picquet Jnr. should have said on a number of occasions that Alonso was extremely helpful and that he had learnt a lot from him.

 

[Il_leone]

I don't think how to cope with Flavio was one of them when being backed into a corner

I do blame Piquet Jnr and his dad expecting a fair chance when it is obviously clear who Flavio favoured clearly from the outset

I remember when Heikki was having a bad run to his career Piquet Snr was nudging Flavio to give Nelsinho a run