What Felipe Massa has privately said about losing the 2008 F1 championship to Lewis Hamilton

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Lewis Hamilton’s first Formula 1 drivers’ championship will always be regarded as one of his greatest and most controversial achievements.

The 2008 season saw Lewis Hamilton beat Felipe Massa by the barest of margins, but the controversy has nothing to do with the former McLaren and Mercedes driver.

Fernando Alonso’s win at the Singapore Grand Prix led to Crashgate and Flavio Briatore briefly being banned from Formula 1 after Nelson Piquet Jr. publicly suggested he had been told to find a way to bring out the safety car to benefit his Renault teammate.

Massa finished outside the points that day, potentially costing him the championship, and Bernie Ecclestone’s quotes in a 2023 interview with F1 Insider have led to the Brazilian taking Formula 1 to court.

“[Former FIA president] Max Mosley and I were informed during the 2008 season about what had happened in the race in Singapore,” Ecclestone said.

“Piquet Jr. had told his father Nelson that he had been asked by the team to deliberately crash into the wall at a certain point in order to trigger a safety car phase and thus help his teammate Alonso.”

This led to the 2008 finale at the Brazilian Grand Prix being decisive for Hamilton and Massa.

McLaren’s former head of PR, Matt Bishop, has now shared what Massa privately told him after he was famously world champion for 30 seconds before Hamilton’s famous Timo Glock moment.

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Bishop was speaking about the race on the Colossally That’s History Podcast and said: “I’ll tell you a story. A couple of years later, I found myself, so 2010-ish, I think, I found myself sitting next to him on a flight to Nagoya, Japan.

“Him still a Ferrari driver, and me still the McLaren comms and PR chief. And we sat next to each other, and we talked, as you would.

“We talked about Brazil 2008. And he said that had he not won the race, he might have found the disappointment difficult to cope with, perhaps even impossible.

“But because he had won from pole position, dominating the race, and he’d therefore done a perfect job. I mean, not even Juan Manuel Fangio or Jim Clark, or not even his hero, Ayrton Senna, could have done anything at all better, because he did a perfect job.

“He was able to cope. He had done everything perfectly. And by the way, it was a brilliant win. It was a perfect win.

“But it had been hard, he admitted, the experience of thinking he’d won the championship for half a minute and then realising he hadn’t. And why wouldn’t that be hard?

“He did admit it had been hard. And if he hadn’t won the race and therefore had lost the championship because he’d finished second, he might always have blamed himself for not winning.

“And then I think he might have found it impossible.”

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The 2008 season was the peak of Massa’s F1 career, as he never won another race before his eventual retirement in 2017.

As Bishop describes, Massa drove perfectly at Interlagos that day. However, he couldn’t account for Timo Glock failing to change his slick tyres as the predictably changeable weather descended on the track.

Glock revealed what Hamilton said to him after the race as the German received a tirade of abuse from Brazilian fans who believed they had denied them another champion.

Massa has also shared his message to Glock following the race, and as he revealed, he wasn’t upset with the result of that particular race.

The 44-year-old is one of many drivers in Formula 1’s long and storied history who have seen controversy surround their greatest season.

Hamilton will be able to sympathise with his old rival after what happened to him 13 years later in Abu Dhabi.