[Deschodt]

I watched a super interesting 90 min long interview of Cyril Abitboul - ex Renault F1 (and before that caterham etc)... It was an open window on the backroom dealings in F1 right before F1 exploded with netflix and Liberty... At a time where teams could have floundered and F1 was losing popularity... actually he made a drive to survice like movie about renault from the inside, with some drama and famous directors and they showed it to netflix, which sorta convinced them to move forward with DTS !

He was there (in another role) when Briatore cheated in singapore and had to be the one to fire him... He then played a high wire act of trying to keep the team afloat with little money and little internal support from Ghosn, who actually killed the team one friday evening... Rather than giving up, Cyril contacted the F1 owners ( just before liberty - forgot the name) and got them to help out money wise to keep F1 afloat because it could not survive with the Renault engine gone at the time, as it supplied a couple teams and they were trying to sell F1 for 4 billions or something to liberty..

Lots of interesting anecdotes on how screwed up the caterham deal was, etc... Said Sainz was a fantastic guy as well as driver, very well surrounded and just a good person... the day he hired ricciardo he told his wife, "good news I've secured Daniel, bad news I'll be fired next year for sure, because the car is not good enough this year and with daniel here it's gonna be blamed on me".. Ricciardo essentially came one year too soon as the car was actually not bad the following year... as it turned out ricciardo left early anyway, then managing F1 thru covid etc...

Some poker with Redbull and Marko (you can tell he's not a fan of helmut). At some point redbull asked to breach their engine contract (after 4 WC) because they thought they would get a mercedes engine. Abitboul agreed to let them go because he was 90% sure the mercedes engine deal would not happen and it was a trick of Lauda... it did not, and RB had to come back to renault tail between their legs allowing renault to get the upper hand contract wise (that was when the engine was actually still good, ironically then it was no longer good but RB has already shot themselves in the foot contract wise). That is also how they got Sainz for peanuts as part of the deal! anyway I forgot soem stuff, but the backroom dealing in F1 are amazing... it's in french though (legend podcast).