Flavio Briatore's Controversial Claims on FIA Ruling

Flavio Briatore walked into the press room on Friday with a piece of paper in his hand and a score to settle. By the time he walked out, Formula 1 had another political storm on its hands.

Only hours earlier, the FIA’s International Court of Appeal had stripped Alpine and Pierre Gasly of their Monaco Grand Prix podium, upholding McLaren and Red Bull’s challenge and wiping away Gasly’s hard-fought top-three in Monte Carlo. The legal battle over the result had dragged on for months. The verdict landed in the morning. The backlash arrived by afternoon.

Briatore did not waste time picking apart the court’s legal reasoning. He went straight for one of the judges.

“Filippo Marchino is a judge, he was very nasty during the hearing, was acting as a prosecutor,” he said, reading deliberately from his notes. Then came the sting. “And after, we found out what is the reason why so nasty, this guy. He is very linked with McLaren.”

He called the situation “very unfair”. He claimed Alpine had “a nice picture of this guy at a speech for McLaren in 2018 in MSO, Beverly Hills”, again without producing the image, and then pointed to Marchino’s role with the One Drop Foundation.

“He has a foundation, it's called One Drop Foundation, and McLaren gave two, three McLaren cars. This was quite unfair.”

Those cars relate to a 2019 charity auction for One Drop, on whose board Marchino sits. One Drop was founded by Guy Laliberte, the Cirque du Soleil co-founder, a long-time associate of McLaren through his friendship with former team boss Ron Dennis. McLaren providing auction items in that context is hardly outlandish. Yet in Briatore’s telling, it cast a shadow over the integrity of the appeal.

The accusations detonated in the middle of a standard race-weekend press conference. The FIA representatives in the room looked stunned. McLaren’s team principal Andrea Stella looked furious.

“I find that this conference going in this direction is quite insulting for McLaren, for the reputation of a team that deserves a lot of respect,” Stella shot back.

“If anybody makes these kind of allegations – which seem quite serious – they are going to have to take the responsibility for what they are saying in a public forum.

The hearing, the whole International Court of Appeal, was conducted to the highest standards and we should not question this phase like it’s been done.”

Stella’s anger underlined just how far Briatore had gone. This was not a coded swipe or a vague complaint about “politics”. It was a direct suggestion that a judge involved in a high-profile FIA case had ties to a rival team that should have been declared.

Briatore, though, hinted that Alpine were not done.

“We’ve been thinking about it,” he said when asked if the team would take the matter further. “Just pass the weekend and after that we think about it. For the moment, I don’t know.”

The problem for Alpine is that the legal ladder inside motorsport effectively ends where they now stand. The International Court of Appeal is the FIA’s highest judicial body. Its verdict on the Monaco GP podium is, in principle, final. There is no conventional appeal route.

There is, however, a narrow escape hatch: a right of review. That mechanism mirrors the process used for stewarding decisions. A party can request the case be reopened if “important new evidence is discovered which was unknown at the outset of the case before the ICA”.

Briatore insists Alpine only learned of Marchino’s alleged links to McLaren after the hearing. “We found out, after the meeting, logically, not before,” he said. “We found out this guy was linked with the McLaren team.”

Whether that claim can clear the bar for a right of review is another matter entirely.

The FIA moved quickly on Friday to underline the robustness of the system that put Marchino and his colleagues on the panel. The International Court of Appeal draws from a roster of 36 prominent legal figures. For each case, at least eight are shortlisted. That shortlist is sent to the parties well in advance, giving them the chance to flag “serious and objective reasons” why any of the candidates should be recused for conflict of interest or other valid grounds.

Alpine did not raise any objections during that phase. With no red flags from the teams involved, ICA president Laurent Anselmi, from Monaco, selected four judges for the Monaco appeal.

There is another important detail buried in the regulations. For any ICA hearing tied to the world championship, at least one judge must come from a pool elected at the FIA General Assembly on proposal from at least five teams or three manufacturers. In 2023, Marchino – along with Luigi Fumagalli, who also sat on the Monaco panel – was nominated and elected after being put forward by teams themselves.

Any such candidate faces due diligence from the FIA compliance officer and review by an ad hoc panel before recommendations go to the eligibility assessment committee. Only then do they join the pool. When judges are assigned to a specific case, they must confirm to the FIA secretary general that they have no conflicts of interest. The final composition of the panel remains secret until the day of the hearing.

In other words, the system is designed to flush out exactly the sort of conflict Briatore now alleges. Alpine had visibility of the shortlist. They stayed silent. They then lost the appeal. Now their most high-profile figure is questioning the process in public.

The stakes are obvious. On one side, a team that feels robbed of a rare Monaco podium and believes it has uncovered a connection that should at least have been disclosed. On the other, a rival defending its reputation and a governing body insisting its checks and balances held firm.

The three-month fight over a single result has already dragged Formula 1 deep into legal territory. If Alpine decide to push for a right of review based on Briatore’s claims, the sport will be forced back into the courtroom, this time with the independence of its own judges under the microscope.

For now, the Monaco podium stands as rewritten by the ICA. Gasly’s trophy is gone. McLaren and Red Bull have their way. And the paddock waits to see whether Briatore’s piece of paper was the end of the story – or the start of an even more uncomfortable one for the FIA.