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Where were you from one to three in the afternoon on May 23, 2004? If in Monaco, then you can consider yourself a suspect, or at least a witness in the most mysterious story of Formula 1.
On this day, a car took part in the race, on the hood of which there was a diamond worth 300 thousand dollars. But the car crashed into a fence on the first lap of the race, the precious stone disappeared - and it has not been found for 22 years.
Maybe someone picked it up? Maybe he was swept away like trash on the side of the road? Maybe it was washed down the drain? And anyway, was this diamond real?
The reason why a 1.4-carat diamond ended up on the hood of a racing car that accelerates to 320 km/h in races is simple: PR.
Jaguar Racing's results since its inception in F1 competition in 2000 have been mediocre, to put it mildly. By 2004, Ford, which owned the team, decided that this sport had to end.
“My job has basically turned from managing the team to trying to sell it and finding a new owner. Otherwise they would have simply disbanded it,” former team manager Tony Purnell tells BBC Sport. “It was probably the worst year of my life.” Mainly because for the first few months I was forbidden to say anything.”
The team needed good PR to divert the attention of potential buyers from its results.
She had already enjoyed successful promotions at Silverstone the previous season with her Terminator 3 partnership, and now communications director Nav Sidhu was hoping to replicate that success by turning to film again.
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“Somewhere in the winter of 2003, I heard rumors about the filming of the film Ocean’s Twelve, we learned that some scenes were being filmed in Monte Carlo - and now we have a contract with George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Matt Damon,” says Sidhu.
He agreed with legendary Hollywood producer Jerry Weintraub that the actors would appear at races in Monaco one weekend.
The plot of the film was based on the daring theft of a Faberge egg encrusted with diamonds. Sidhu decided that at the most glamorous race in the entire Formula 1 calendar, his team's cars should also appear in all their splendor - and agreed with the diamond manufacturer, Steinmetz, that two Jaguar cars would be equipped with one gemstone, worth a total of about a million dollars in today's prices. We plan to use another diamond for photo shoots.
Jewels in steel frames were attached to the nose cones of two fireballs. One of them was driven by experienced F1 driver Mark Webber, the other by newcomer Christian Klien. Webber started eleventh, and Klin, for whom this was only the sixth race in his career, started fourteenth.
Nobody expected that they would end up on the podium at the end of the race. It was enough to just bring the diamonds to the finish line.
But then everything didn’t go according to plan.
The trajectory of the track in Monaco is difficult: the roads are narrow, the turns are sharp and there is a tunnel. It’s difficult to overtake there, collisions are common, and Klin very soon became convinced of this.
Already on the chaotic first lap, the driver ground one of the Jordan team cars at the fifth turn, which is called Mirabeu. The front of his car was damaged, and at the next turn, the sixth, the famous Loews hairpin, he crashed into the guardrail.
Wedge got out of the car in one piece, but the hood of the car - where the diamond was - was crushed.
Soon Sidhu received a call from the jewelers at Steinmetz asking if the diamond would be returned to them. "I don't remember what I said, but it certainly wasn't 'yes,'" says Jaguar's PR man. He couldn't even see the car because there were still 76 laps left in the race. Only after this would Klin’s car, which had already been moved behind the fence by a crane, be delivered to the garage.
“I couldn’t find a place for myself and was thinking how to get there quickly,” recalls Sidhu. — These one and a half hours, while the race continued, were like a day and a half for me. Each circle is as if a tooth is being pulled out without anesthesia.”
And when he was finally able to see the car, the diamond was no longer on it.
What happened?
image copyrightJames Moy/Sutton Images
Version one: the diamond was fake
Sidhu categorically disagrees with the version about the fake diamond.
“I know that no diamond company would take the risk, especially publicly, of using fake stones, because the likelihood of exposure is extremely high,” he says. “If we had used a fake diamond and then what happened, the reputational consequences for both Jaguar and Formula 1 would have been too serious.”
“There are many conspiracy theories, and one of them is about a fake stone. I think this is what keeps history interesting: there is a mystery in it, and riddles always give rise to all kinds of speculation,” says Sidhu.
Purnell also confirms the authenticity of the stone, citing a conversation with team managing director David Pitchforth, who told him that he had scratched the office window with a stone - this is how their authenticity is verified: “Hearing that from Dave, I have no doubt for a second that the car was fitted with a real diamond.”
“I don’t know if any of our mechanics would be smart enough to make a fake, but I highly doubt it,” says Purnell.
Version two: someone found the diamond
This version seems plausible to both Pernell and Sidhu.
“I think someone just picked it up, stuck it in their pocket, and is still grinning knowing that now they have a real diamond sitting on a shelf in their closet,” Purnell says. “I also think that a fairly large diamond flying somewhere at a speed of 160 km/h could have split.” Someone picked up one fragment of it, someone else picked up another.”
“Or maybe - alas! “It was just swept off the road by some worker or one of those brush machines, and the stone ended up in the sewer,” Pernell continues. “I also had this crazy thought: how beautiful it would be if the theft was carried out by Clooney, Pitt and Damon - just like in Ocean’s Eleven.” But this is already in the realm of complete fantasy.”
There must have been hundreds, if not thousands of people in this area, because within an hour after the end of the race the track again became a regular public road.
Sidhu is almost sure that someone picked up the diamond.
“You know, people often pick up pieces of tires - they claim that it is, say, a fragment of the front tire of Michael Schumacher’s car, or something like that. And someone could pick up the diamond without even realizing that it had fallen off the car,” says Sidhu. - After all, Monte Carlo is full of diamonds. There are a lot of people walking around there, dressed in diamonds and other jewelry. And then someone dropped a diamond in Monte Carlo. It’s unlikely that the owner didn’t notice this, right? Most likely, he noticed.”
Version three: the driver deliberately crashed the car
Sidhu does not believe this version. According to him, the damage to the car from the accident was much more than the value of the diamond - which, as reported at the time, was not insured.
Moreover, points and success in the race were of much greater value to both the team and the drivers themselves than any diamond or hype that arose after the accident. It was simply pointless to deliberately arrange it.
“For us, finishing both cars—preferably in the points zone—gave us an obvious and much more significant commercial benefit: points in the Constructors’ Championship, prize money from television broadcasts, and most importantly, the opportunity to retain sponsors and preserve the team’s reputation,” explains Sidhu.
The wedge crashed into the barrier right in front of the marshals-controllers, and there was no chance for him to try to find or pick up the diamond, even if he wanted to.
“Christian didn’t make excuses like the brakes failed or something like that; he just admitted, 'I made a mistake, like rookies make,'" Purnell says.
“He was still very young, it was his first experience - anything can happen,” he says. “Of course, it doesn’t happen every day that a $300,000 diamond flies into the crowd or wherever it ends up, but I’m sure Christian didn’t even know it existed.” No amount of money would make Christian do this [intentional accident]. He strived to succeed in his business."
Every cloud has a silver lining
While these events were unfolding, Pernell wasn't even thinking much about the diamond. He was much more concerned about the fact that one of his riders crashed into the fence, the other did not make it to the finish line, and that all this was not at all good from the point of view of retaining current sponsors or finding potential buyers.
“First Christian flew into the wall, then Mark left the race and all I could think about was: God, what am I going to say? - Pernell recalls. — John Bond, chairman of the board of directors of HSBC, the then sponsor of the team, and Jackie (Jackie Stewart, the legendary British racing driver) were there. How will I explain this disastrous performance to them? How can I tell them “Continue to support us, we know what we are doing, we need time”? Sponsors don’t have time, they need success.”
In the end, the missing diamond helped him. “Nobody said that Jarno Trulli won the Grand Prix, no one asked how Jaguar was doing, no one was interested in the fact that Mark Webber’s car also broke down. Everyone said, “Where is the diamond?” - Pernell recalls.
"I spoke to someone from Ford in Detroit and they were delighted: 'What PR! We don't usually talk about Formula 1, but now it's all over the TV news and in all the newspapers - amazing!'"
Asked if the diamond mystery helped sell the team to Red Bull six months later, he says: “I think it helped a lot because it revived the image of the Jaguar team and showed that you can get huge press coverage even if things aren't going so well.”
The Red Bull team subsequently achieved impressive success, winning eight Drivers' Championships and six Constructors' Championships.
“I couldn’t have come up with better PR,” Pernell says now.
Even if everything didn't go quite as planned and there was still a small problem with the missing diamond.
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