Briatore will â€˜probablyâ€™ sue Piquets

Flavio Briatore plans to take legal action against the Piquet family for alleging that he hatched the Crashgate' race-fixing plot.Nelson Piquet Jr triggered the events that led to Briatore being handed a lifetime ban from motor racing by the FIA when he claimed his then team boss had ordered him to crash deliberately in the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix to help Fernando Alonso win the race.After his ban was overturned by the French civil courts on Tuesday, Briatore claimed his name had been cleared but said he was still minded to sue the Piquets.Very probably, he told La Gazzetta dello Sport.I won't forget the pain I've suffered just like that.Briatore said he was convinced that former FIA president Max Mosley had been determined to pin the blame on him because of their past conflicts.It was a case of vengeance by Mosley, who has always run the FIA and the World Council as if it was his private property, he said. First Mosley tried to make me lose titles, first with [Michael] Schumacher then with [Fernando] Alonso, and then he tried to destroy me with this story.The court did not in fact exonerate Briatore, but concluded that the FIA had over-reached itself by imposing a lifetime ban on someone who was not one of its licence holders.However it did provide some support for Briatore's view that Mosley had an axe to grind arguing that the FIA president should not have sat in judgment on his long-time nemesis.The decision was taken while the [World Motor Sport] Council was chaired by [Mosley], who had notoriously come into conflict with Mr Briatore, the court judgment said.Mr Mosley played a key role in launching [both] the inquiry and the legal process, violating the principle of a separation of the bodies that are responsible for the investigation and for the judgment.Briatore says he has no immediate plans to return to the F1 paddock, but intends to resume his role as a driver manager, which was also proscribed by the original FIA ban and might sue those drivers who cut their ties with him when the scandal broke.Apart from Heikki Kovalainen and Lucas di Grassi, my relationship with the other drivers has never changed, he said.In fact, now we will look at the situation with lawyers to see if we should take legal action against those who have broken contracts with us.The FIA is considering appealing the court verdict, and says that unless and until it decides not to do so the bans against Briatore and Renault's former engineering chief Pat Symonds remain in force.