Ted Kravitz has admitted he had an “awkward” relationship with Pat Symonds during the 72-year-old’s brief stint as a Sky Sports F1 pundit. Symonds joined the Sky Sports team ahead of the 2017 season, before concentrating on his role as F1’s chief technical officer.
Symonds carved out a reputation as an elite F1 technical boss during spells with Benetton, Renault and Williams. He was Michael Schumacher’s race engineer when the German won his first two world championships in the mid-1990s. And a decade later, he helped Fernando Alonso win two world titles with Renault. But he left Renault in 2009 after the Crashgate scandal, where Nelson Piquet Jr deliberately crashed at the Singapore Grand Prix in 2008 in order to trigger a Safety Car in an attempt to help his team-mate Alonso, who eventually won the race.
Symonds explained in a submission to the FIA at the time: “In a single action I have destroyed the high reputation I have built up during a 33-year career in motor sport.
“I am a competitive person who worked in a high-pressure environment. This can, at times, cloud one’s judgement. On that night in Singapore last year, I made a mistake the consequences of which I could never have imagined at the time.”
Symonds was initially slapped with a five-year ban from F1 following Crashgate, but the ban was later overturned by a French court.
The Briton returned to the sport in 2011 in a consultancy role, before becoming chief technical officer at Willams in 2013. And following his short stint with Sky Sports and his job as F1’s chief technical officer, he began a role as an executive engineering consultant with Cadillac at the start of this year.
Kravitz, who has been a key feature of Sky Sports’ F1 coverage since the broadcaster won the rights to screen the sport in 2012, has released a book called F1 Insider: Notes from the Pit Lane.
And in the book, the 51-year-old speaks about Symonds as he explains: “I had believed Symonds when he [initially] protested his innocence.
“He’d been a regular contact in the pit lane, and I trusted him. So when the truth came out, I had a keen sense of having been deceived.
“I’m not even sure Symonds would have considered what he orchestrated as such a terrible crime. Piquet wasn’t risking his life in a slow-speed crash, and it was unlikely any marshals or spectators would have been hurt.
“Maybe he just saw it, to quote himself, as a bit of gamesmanship. Maybe he succumbed to that pressure at Renault and hoped at least that it would be a victimless crime. But it wasn’t victimless. In the end, the victims were two Brazilian racing drivers.”
Kravitz then adds in the book: “Along the way, he also spent a year on our team at Sky Sports as an expert analyst. And yes, it was awkward between him and me.”
