The glitz and glamor of Monaco, Hollywood movie stars, high-octane racing and a pile of diamonds worth £140,000…
If this sounds like the plot outline of a hit heist movie, then truth is stranger than fiction.
This weekend, the Formula One roadshow comes to Monaco once again, 20 years after one of the sport’s most extraordinary mysteries.
It’s the story of how the Jaguar F1 team, with a little help from George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Matt Damon (and some clearly sloppy driving), pulled off the biggest PR coup or disaster of all time.
With the hit film Ocean’s Twelve in production and the Monaco race fast approaching, Jaguar Racing communications director Nav Sidhu saw the stars aligning.
Hollywood stars George Clooney (second left), Brad Pitt (center) and Matt Damon (second right) with Jaguar F1 drivers Christian Klien (left) and Mark Webber (right) and a branded nose Ocean’s Twelve before the 2004 Monaco Grand Prix.
An elaborate stunt to promote both Jaguar and Ocean’s Twelve involved mounting $250,000 worth of diamonds on the noses of the cars during the Monaco race.
His team, in its fifth F1 season, desperately needed a PR boost. They had finished seventh in the constructors’ championship two years in a row and were well used to being at the back of the grid as owners Ford looked to cut their losses.
Sidhu had noticed that many Hollywood celebrities liked to attend the Grand Awards, but they liked to hang around the grid, promote their own songs in interviews and not fully participate.
So, after the huge success of Ocean’s Eleven and knowing that the sequel was in the works, Sidhu came up with a bold plan.
Not only would the Jaguar cars be renamed during the Monaco weekend to promote the upcoming film, but huge (and real) Steinmetz diamonds would be fitted to their noses during the races.
While the actual plot of Ocean’s Twelve featured a gorgeous Fabergé egg and not gems, you try to fit one of those into an F1 car.
Each of the diamonds was valued at £140,000, about $250,000 at the time. Before the race, for promotional photographs, they would be mounted directly to the body of the car.
For the race itself, however, smaller, button-sized gems would be placed on the nose within a metal frame and branded Steinmetz.
The usual Jaguar livery was replaced with a promotional one for the film Ocean’s Twelve.
For the Grand Prix itself, a smaller diamond was mounted on the Jaguars’ nose.
To maximize publicity, the film’s stars Clooney, Pitt and Damon flew to Monaco and posed for photos in the pit lane with Jaguar drivers Mark Webber and Christian Klien.
No doubt many F1 fans made fun of the stunt. The tight street circuit is famous for incidents and crashes, especially on the first lap because overtaking opportunities are slim thereafter.
Putting a diamond in one of the car’s most vulnerable spots was simply asking for trouble. But that was the point.
“If there was no danger, there would be no story in the first place,” Sidhu said. Unit.
“There is nothing remotely interesting about putting a diamond in a car, except in situations where there could be a risk to that diamond.”
Seeking to dispel one of the many conspiracy theories about the incident, Sidhu also insists that they were real diamonds.
Formula One supreme Bernie Ecclestone with Hollywood stars in the Jaguar pit lane
“You’re just not going to find a reputable diamond company in the world that will give you fake diamonds,” he says.
During practice, Austrian driver Klien crashed his Jaguar, but the damage occurred to the rear of the car, leaving the diamond intact. But it was a bad omen.
On the first lap of Sunday’s race, Klien attempted to make his way from 15th on the grid. He was not successful. -Trapped by two Jordans, he crashed into Nick Heidfeld’s car and lost his spoiler, which got stuck under his front wheels.
Unable to brake, his Jaguar crashed into the tire wall just in front of the Loews hairpin. The nose and diamond were buried in rubber, and Klien’s first race in Monaco was over within a minute.
“I must admit my immediate thought was the diamond,” Sidhu told The Independent after the race.
While marshals dressed in high-visibility orange swarmed the car to recover Klien and the race was yellow-flagged, the Jaguar crew was unable to reach their crashed vehicle for two hours.
At that point the diamond had disappeared and would never be seen again.
A nightmare for Klien with his Grand Prix done and dusted after a crash on the first lap
“Someone here has taken more than just a motor racing souvenir,” Sidhu told The Guardian at the time, but the whodunnit never came to fruition.
The most obvious suspects were the deputies who arrived on the scene first. While removing the damaged car, it would have been very easy to put the mounted diamond and a piece of carbon fiber in his pocket.
But images of the accident cast doubt on this theory. It suggests that the diamond had already fallen from the car before hitting the barrier, potentially during contact with Heidfeld’s car.
That would put it among the debris scattered from the first-round collisions, meaning anyone could have picked it up or simply been swept up and discarded.
‘It is gone. “We have 100,000 people running around trying to find a piece of a crashed car in the countryside,” Sidhu told The Independent. “I don’t expect us to get it back.”
It was a rare day off for Ferrari’s Michael Schumacher that season when he crashed.
Jarno Trulli (Renault) achieved victory in Monaco after a race interrupted by accidents
British driver Jenson Button, from the BAR-Honda team, finished second on the podium in Monaco
But it was a bittersweet moment. The publicity stunt and subsequent intrigue following Klein’s accident managed to generate millions of dollars in press for Jaguar and the film.
Steinmetz was relatively unknown in the gemstone world at the time, but his brand received exposure that money couldn’t buy. From a public relations perspective, it was mission accomplished.
F1 fans have speculated in the years since Klien crashed on purpose, but that makes little sense when points that weekend were a real possibility.
Also, why not just crash into the wall directly instead of prancing around other cars first?
The race was won by Renault’s Jarno Trulli and British driver Jenson Button came second, an anomaly in a season dominated by Michael Schumacher.
Jaguar returned to seventh place in the rankings and Ocean’s Twelve received mixed reviews from critics. Perhaps they had a better plot before them.
