In order to pull off a feat like this, recovering a quarter-million dollar diamond from the nosecone of a bad race car from a dead F1 team that crashed 20 years ago, I’d have to be completely bonkers. And I’m going to need a crew as bonkers as I am. This is one of the most bizarre stories in F1 history, and all eyes were on the Monaco Grand Prix just this weekend. Surely if they haven’t found the damn thing by now I won’t have a chance. That’s what you think.
During the 2004 Monaco Grand Prix the Jaguar team (in rather dire straits, it should be known) took on sponsorship from the Steven Soderbergh heist film sequel “Oceans Twelve.” As part of the promotion for the film the Jaguars were fitted with giant glittering Steinmetz diamonds valued around a quarter million dollars each. Team drivers Christian Klein and Mark Webber got away cleanly from the start, but later the first lap Klein would nose-in to the barrier, losing his front wing in the process.
The car was craned off the racing surface, but it would be a couple of hours before the team could attend to it, due to the geography issues of the tight Monegasque circuit. When the team arrived on the scene to retrieve the car and the lost wing, the diamond was gone. The going theory is that the rock jumped out of its nose carrier on impact with the wall and got swept up with the rest of the track debris at race end. I know better than all that.
Klein obviously orchestrated the crash that saw him run over his own wing, pocketed the stone, palmed it off to a Jaguar associate dressed as a corner marshal, who then acted out a wardrobe change, a natural twenty deception roll, and obfuscated the diamond away to the secret hiding place, a vault at the bottom of the Monaco harbor. It is my belief that the driving squad and a few of their green-and-red associates left the stone unceremoniously in that watery vault at the time of the event and intended to return several years in the future to retrieve it. Twenty years, in fact.
Maybe this whole thing was an elaborate ruse to get people to pay attention to the George Clooney Oceans sequel. Or maybe it was all a setup, and while I’ve been telling you this story, my crew has already orchestrated the whole scheme. Maybe they already have the diamond pocketed and replaced with a glittering rock of cut moissanite. Maybe you’ll never know.