Fury over McLaren escape

Ferrari reacted with fury last night after an emergency hearing into the Formula One spy row resulted in McLaren Mercedes escaping without punishment. The FIA, the governing body of motor sport, gave Lewis Hamilton’s team a “let-off” over the possession of a huge dossier of secret technical information, a decision the Italian team were quick to condemn.
After hearing the announcement by the FIA’s World Motor Sport Council (WMSC) in Paris, Ferrari said that it “legitimises dishonest behaviour in Formula One and sets a very serious precedent”.
The angry reaction in Maranello came as Hamilton and Fernando Alonso, his team-mate, were breathing a sigh of relief. The affair could have resulted in both drivers losing points or even being thrown out of the World Championship.
Barely had McLaren digested the good news than their deadly rivals in the paddock, who trail them in the drivers’ and constructors’ battles this season, launched a scathing attack on an FIA process that Ferrari said they regarded as “incomprehensible”.
The Italian team were particularly incensed that McLaren got away virtually scot-free, even though the WMSC had found that the Anglo-German team had been in possession of Ferrari data through Mike Coughlan, their disgraced chief designer, who has admitted having a 780-page dossier of secrets.
Ferrari said that “violating the fundamental principle of sporting honesty” should have resulted, as a “logical and inevitable consequence”, in the application of a sanction. The statement went on: “The decision of the World Council signifies that [the] violations do not carry any punishment.” The Scuderia added that they regard what happened in Paris yesterday as “highly prejudicial to the credibility of the sport”.
The sound and fury in Maranello came after the WMSC had convened to hear McLaren answer a charge of “fraudulent conduct” over the affair but decided against any immediate punishment because it found no evidence that Ferrari technical data had been used on this year’s McLaren race cars.
“The World Motor Sport Council is satisfied that Vodafone McLaren Mercedes was in possession of confidential Ferrari information — however, there is insufficient evidence that this information was used in such a way as to interfere improperly with the World Championship,” the WMSC said.
The council did impose a suspended sentence of sorts on McLaren when adding that, if evidence is found in the future that the Ferrari information had been used “to the detriment of the championship”, the team would be summoned back to Paris to face the possibility of being thrown out of this year’s championship, as well as being banned from next year’s.
Ron Dennis, the McLaren team principal, who appeared in Paris alongside Ian Mills, QC, the team’s lawyer, emerged from the session looking as though he had lost. “The process has been long and detailed and I’m not completely comfortable with the outcome,” Dennis said.
Then, in what may have been a note of deep irony from the veteran team leader — who has never admitted that McLaren, as a team, did anything wrong — he said: “The punishment fits the crime.”
While McLaren escaped immediate sanction and are free to concentrate on their World Championship campaign, the two individuals at the heart of the scandal were not so fortunate. Nigel Stepney, the former Ferrari mechanic who has denied allegations that he supplied Coughlan with the dossier, and Coughlan, have been “invited” by the WMSC to demonstrate why both should not be banned for a lengthy period from international motor sport.
The let-off for McLaren is all the more astonishing for the fact that the team admitted that Coughlan was in possession of the data for two months, amounting to a comprehensive picture of all Ferrari’s activities. The rules that govern Formula One make it clear that the FIA can punish a team for the actions of any individual within it, even if the team as a whole are not aware what that individual had been doing.
In the run-up to the hearing, the seriousness of McLaren’s position had been underlined by Max Mosley, the FIA president, who chaired yesterday’s meeting and who admitted that the credibility of Formula One had been at stake over the issue.