F1: Stepneygate could decide World Championships

Wednesday 4th July 2007

As F1 grapples with the incredible developments of Stepneygate, which culminated in McLaren suspending their chief designer on Tuesday after Ferrari documents were allegedly uncovered at his home, a nightmare scenario looms over the sport: the World Championship being won and lost in the courts.

Having already launched legal proceedings against their mechanic Nigel Stepney, Ferrari's claim of espionage took on a sensational dimension on Tuesday when a police raid, made at their behest, allegedly found 'technical information' stolen from their Maranello base at the home of Mike Coughlan, McLaren's chief designer.

Announcing that they had presented 'a case against Nigel Stepney and an engineer from the Vodafone McLaren Mercedes team with the Modena Tribunal, concerning the theft of technical information', Ferrari pointedly ruled out further legal redress. 'Ferrari reserves the right to consider all implications, be they criminal, civil or of any other nature, according to the applicable laws,' it declared in a statement.

"We have proof that Stepney had been supplying technical information to a McLaren employee and we found evidence of that fact in his [the employee's] home. This is a very serious situation. We are talking about a lot of information being given to a prominent McLaren engineer. We are not talking here about rumours or speculation."

As a mood of crisis threatened to envelop the sport on Tuesday night, the FIA confirmed that, "We have received information on this matter, which we are examining."

The governing body will be powerless during any criminal investigation either in Italy or Britain, but it is already being speculated that Ferrari could launch a separate case that would determine the victors of both the Drivers' and Constructors' World Championships in the courts.

Their case would be advanced if they could prove a correlation between performance and the alleged 'dirty tricks'.

Tellingly, the discovery of a mysterious white powder in the fuel tanks of both Felipe Massa and Kimi Raikkonen's cars just before the Monaco GP, which prompted the internal enquiry that resulted in Stepney's sacking, coincided with a sudden regression by the team's chargers. Having won the previous two races in dominant fashion, Ferrari then failed to challenge for victory in the next three.

Meanwhile, with McLaren admitting that 'a senior member of its technical organisation personally received a package of technical information from a Ferrari employee at the end of April', The Guardian reports that 'Ferrari believe that the improvement in McLaren's performance after the Spanish Grand Prix on May 13 is consistent with the apparent leaks at the end of April.'

Planet F1

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