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Bernie Ecclestone says the lifetime motorsport ban handed to former Renault team boss Flavio Briatore for race-fixing was unnecessarily harsh. Last Monday the World Motor Sport Council banished Briatore from all FIA-sanctioned events and from managing drivers who compete in FIA-sanctioned championships for an indefinite period.

Renault’s former engineering chief Pat Symonds was banned for five years for his role in the conspiracy, while the team escaped relatively lightly with its ban suspended for two years. Just three days after the hearing, Ecclestone said the WMSC – of which he is a member – had got Renault’s penalty right but had treated Briatore too harshly.

“If you look at it sensibly, the people at the top had not the slightest idea,” he was quoted as saying by Autosport. “The people in the Renault F1 team had not the slightest idea. There were three people who knew what was going on and that is it. No one else was involved. Those people have been dealt with – in my view quite harshly in [respect of] Flavio. I don’t think it was necessary, but I was on the commission so I am probably just as guilty as anyone else. On reflection it wasn’t necessary. It was too much. Definitely too much.”

However, Ecclestone suggested that Briatore would have helped his cause if he had come clean about what happened instead of maintaining his innocence.

“Firstly he [Flavio] was invited to appear [in front of the World Motor Sport Council] and his lawyers wrote and said the FIA have no jurisdiction as far as he is concerned, which was probably right,” he said. “But it was not the right thing to say. It would have been just as easy to say: ‘I was caught with my hand in the till, it seemed a good idea at the time, and I am sorry.’ [The FIA] is an organisation that works very, very well on that idea – where the people go to a box and confess...He has just handled the whole thing badly. He could have handled it in a completely different way, and they would have said, ‘you were a naughty boy' and that would have been the end of it.”

The F1 ringmaster thinks Briatore would be unwise to carry out his threat of bringing legal proceedings against the FIA – and instead advised him to take his case to the FIA’s International Court of Appeal.

“It would be stupid of Flavio to do that,” he said. “He should ask to be heard by the court of appeal. He should appeal to the FIA. If he goes to a civil court I don’t think he would win – because the FIA would have to defend and somebody will say that he sent a young guy out to what could have been to his death. So it wouldn’t go down too well.”

Ecclestone admitted that his relationship with Briatore, a close friend and business partner, had come under strain as a result of the scandal.

“He's not talking to me,” he said. “He thinks I should have defended him, which I couldn’t."