Thursday 13th September 2007
Mike Coughlan has finally spoken publicly about the Stepneygate scandal, saying he did receive Ferrari's secrets from Nigel Stepney and he did tell McLaren CEO Martin Whitmarsh's about it and even drew drawings for Paddy Lowe, McLaren's engineering director.
As McLaren face the FIA's World Motor Sport Council in Paris today, Coughlan has publicly revealed potentially damning evidence against McLaren, who suspended him after the scandal broke.
Coughlan has revealed that it was Stepney, Ferrari's sacked chief mechanic, who provided him with the Scuderia's secrets back in mid-March of this year. Stepney, though, has denied this all along.
"He is not a close friend," Coughlan told Autosport. "We are acquaintances who are both in the business of Formula One and have maintained cordial relations over the years.
"Stepney contacted me for the first time in five years on March 1st 2007.
"He subsequently telephoned me and informed me that he was very unhappy with the direction his career was taking at Ferrari and Mr Almondo's promotion above him.
"But he did not pass any technical information about Ferrari to me until mid-March 2007."
However, once he did pass that information to Coughlan, the Brit showed it to McLaren, something the Woking team has claimed never happened. The information included designs of Ferrari's floor device, a rear wing flap separator, and a technique to lower the floor of the car.
"Details of the floor device were sent to me by email to my McLaren work email address," Coughlan continued. "I showed the email fleetingly to Martin Whitmarsh, who asked me to take up the issue with Paddy Lowe, McLaren's engineering director.
"I produced a schematic drawing for Lowe, which I understand he forwarded to the FIA. The FIA subsequently declared the floor device as falling outside the regulations.
"Details of the rear wing device were also sent by email to me. I briefly showed this email to Lowe. I understand he reported this to Charlie Whiting of the FIA at the Melbourne Grand Prix, but he was of the opinion that the design was legal.
"As for the information about the subtle engineering technique, I felt it was inconsequential and so I did not show these details to anyone."
An attack of conscience in April though, led to McLaren setting up a firewall to block any emails from Stepney and Coughlan arranging to meet Stepney to ask him to "stop communicating to me any further."
However, that meeting instead led to Stepney handing Coughlan a "bundle of documents which he asked me to look at. My engineering curiosity got the better of me and I foolishly took the documents from him.
"I casually flicked through them over the course of 25 minutes or so the journey took for Stepney to drive me to the airport. I kept hold of the documents and took them home with me. I did not look further at the documents that weekend."
In fact Coughlan is adamant that he ever barely looked at the material handed to him by Stepney.
"I looked at the papers given to me by Stepney on only a few occasions," he stated. "Certainly the time I spent looking at them in total between receiving them and the search at my house on July 3rd was no more than one to two hours.
"I did not look at them in a discursive or methodical way, nor did I look at all of the documents.
"In the limited period of time I spent reviewing the documents, it was not possible to glean anything that would be of material use to McLaren that we did not already know from our own observation and photographs of Ferrari's car."
However, whether the FIA will believe that won't be known until later this afternoon.
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