THE culmination of a short but brilliant career could be just two days away for Fernando Alonso. He arrived here last night to prepare for the Belgian Grand Prix as quietly and coolly confident as Formula One has come to expect from the man who could be the youngest world champion come Sunday afternoon. Yet the financial rewards of victory over Kimi Räikkönen will fail to live up to the glory.

For Flavio Briatore, his team principal at Renault, makes no bones about the fact that Alonso will not be showered with cash nor will he be able to hold the French squad to ransom, even though his contract will be up next year and plenty of teams will want him. There will be none of the $30 million (about £16 million) salary that Michael Schumacher commands from Ferrari, nor even a shareout comparable to Räikkönen, his closest rival.

Even Ralf Schumacher — apparently getting about $20 million a year at lowly Toyota — is thought to be worth more than the prospective champion. In fact, recent estimates say Alonso might be on as little as £3 million a year before bonuses for his six victories this season.

“Formula One is not a one-man band,” Briatore says. “We would never pay a driver big money to come to us. We don’t pay $20 million or $30 million for one man. There are 800 people in this company and everything they do is important to the result we get on a Sunday afternoon. Always I try to create a driver for this team, this business and, at the moment, we have the best driver for less money.”

It might sound parsimonious, almost cheap for man who runs a nightclub called “Billionaire”, but Briatore is a notoriously fastidious housekeeper. With possibly only the fifth-highest budget in the sport, he is creating one of the most astonishing records: a championship on Sunday would make him the most successful team principal in Formula One over the past 11 years after Jean Todt and ahead of Sir Frank Williams and Ron Dennis, of McLaren.

What is more, he will have achieved that with two different drivers — Schumacher in 1994 and 1995 and now Alonso — as well as effectively creating two new teams and doing it on a budget that would barely keep Ferrari in pasta for a year.

It is a poke in the eye for the disbelievers who say nobody can run a Formula One team unless they have racing in their blood. Briatore is a former stockbroker and guru for the Benetton clothing family who has money in his blood but a shrewd approach to the business of Formula One.

He knew Schumacher could be the best and built a team around him at Benetton that walked all over Damon Hill and a Williams team producing a far superior car on a bigger budget. A brief sabbatical in charge of Supertec, the engine company, allowed him time to pick out Alonso from the crowd and grab him for his management company, even though the Spaniard was an 18-year-old fledgeling.

When Briatore took over at Renault and then promptly dislodged Jenson Button for Alonso, the outcry was huge. Briatore said simply: “Time will tell if I am wrong.” Today, Button is tangled up in a contracts wrangle for the second time in a year and has not won a race, while Alonso is on the verge of becoming champion.

“Jenson is a fine driver but there were too many contracts, too many things in the background,” Briatore says. “These are decisions I have to make and, if I get them wrong, I get fired. Fernando is fantastically cool, intelligent and does not just drive one fast lap. He is, with Räikkönen and Schumacher, the best in Formula One.”

Which would make the Spaniard, at 24, a worthy champion if results go his way this weekend. Briatore is certainly not prejudging events and arranging the victory celebrations already; he remembers too well that fateful final race of the 1999 season, when Schumacher’s confident camp turned up with hundreds of caps labelled “World Champion” only to have to dump them when Mika Häkkinen snatched the title.

But partying is a talent with the nightclub owner and Briatore does not fear being able to put together a bash to remember should Alonso triumph. After all, Briatore has proved he is a phenomenal manager in Formula One.