Flavio Briatore responds to piqued Piquet’s allegations

The flamboyant Italian playboy Flavio Briatore, managing director of the Renault Formula One team, has responded with lightning speed to the allegation made by the former Renault driver Nelson Piquet Jr that he ordered him to purposefully crash out of the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix so that his team-mate Fernando Alonso could win the race.

Briatore and Renault have begun legal proceedings, filed in France, claiming Piquet Jr's allegations are false, and were made in a futile attempt to blackmail Renault into allowing him to continue to drive for the team, having been fired in July after a run of poor results.

The extraordinary and very detailed allegations made by Piquet were contained in a witness statement leaked yesterday ahead of a hearing in Paris on September 21 at which Briatore and Renault face expulsion from Formula One if the allegations stick.

Whether or not Piquet turns out to have been telling the truth, it's certain that the Brazilian driver is partly motivated by an intense hatred for his former boss who he describes as his "executioner". Piquet once said that "the only good thing the team takes out of him is his good relationship with Bernie [Ecclestone] and the FIA. Other than that, he doesn't know what is going on. It's like listening to something my sister would say about the car."

In fairness to Briatore, the Renault boss has never claimed to be any more of an authority on aerodynamics or acceleration than Piquet sister. He enjoys the glamour of the pit lane on race day rather than the hard sweat of the team garage and has even admitted that "the races are quite boring". He once said: "For me, a car is transport. For me, you go in a car because you want to go from one point to another point."

But Briatore has succeeded in F1, since he came into the sport in the late 1980s, because he has gambled on untested young drivers like Michael Schumacher and Alonso, both of whom have gone on to great things. Piquet Jr, son of the three-times world champion Nelson Piquet, has not worked out, however – winning no points for himself or Renault in the first half of this season.

Briatore started out working as a ski instructor in the Italian Alps. He got into the same circles as the Benetton family in 1970s Milan, and made his first fortune after he was employed to sell their clothes store franchises in the US.

Helped by controversial advertising – the 'United Colors of Benetton' ads featured dying Aids sufferers, newborn babies and copulating horses - the firm rapidly became a global brand. Speaking about this marketing strategy, Briatore said: "Fifty per cent of people thought it was great and 50 per cent thought it was awful, but in the meantime everyone was talking about Benetton."

Now, Briatore's business portfolio reads like every teenager boy's wish-list. There's part of the Cipriani restaurant chain; a £68.2m icebreaker which was converted into a yacht; an exclusive Sardinian beach club which sells Methusalehs of Cristal for over £30,000; a spa resort in Kenya; and, for when you need a pair of £500 jeans with gold buttons, a fashion label named Billionaire Couture. Then there's the London football club Queens Park Rangers, which he co-owns with his friend Ecclestone, where he's developed a reputation for meddling in team selection and firing managers at a rate of about three a season.

Of course, one can't mention Briatore without mentioning the girls he's charmed. And as the editor of Italian Vanity Fair said, "Every Italian boy wants to be Flavio." There was Naomi Campbell, until the rows got too much; Heidi Klum, with whom he had a daughter; and now his second wife, Elisabetta Gregoraci (above, with Briatore), a Wonderbra model 30 years his junior. When they married in Rome last year, Alonso – the lead Renault driver, who claims to know nothing of Piquet's alleged race fix - drove the wedding car and Silvio Berlusconi was amongst the guests.