What should be a fair and transparent investigation does appear to be a vindictive hunt. Max’s overturn of the WMSC was pretty tacky.

Is MM completely innocent or is Coughlan on his own – through Stepney – the sole villain in the saga. Thursday will tell. Regardless, the entire matter has been appallingly handled by the FIA, hence your question about it being a witch hunt, because for many that is what it appears to be. Similarly, Ferrari have milked this for all they can get, when the initial WMSC decision was not to their liking they ramped it up to a new level. They are still threatening taking to take the matter to the civil courts.

On the other side of the coin, can you imagine the way Ron would be carrying on if the documents had gone the other way & were found in the possession of a Ferrari employee?

The only real loser in this is F1 & it’s image, & the fact that Max seems ignorant of this only makes me suspicious of him relishing the chance rubbing Ron’s face in the s**t. Thursday can’t come soon enough for me as I would like to see the entire thing resolved………………….I’ll bet I’m to be disappointed.

As for Monza, well in my opinion the video you posted shows the stewards were correct – Massa is very close to Alonso in many sections, especially Parabolica where he will surely suffer from dirty air off the McLaren, robbing him of front grip – what did Alonso think was going to happen? Sure, he had to get round to start his lap, but that’s Alonso’s fault for going late, and Massa shouldn’t suffer for that. The rules are (were) black and white, that anyone on an out lap must not impede anyone on a hot lap.

If anything I think the FIA agreed with Renault, as they later changed the rules to stop the stewards having any say in future such incidents. But the rules being what they were and Alonso placing himself as he did, I don’t see there was much choice.

As to the Stepney issue, Ron Dennis himself may be whiter than white, and wish the team to be so also, but it seems not to be the case for everyone – plenty of smoke at present, if not yet any fire.

In any case, as a sport that lives or dies on advertising revenue and public interest, it’s getting plenty now – racing, infighting and politics. Seems the perfect PR mix.

The Monaco incident with team orders was ridiculous. The gearbox issue appeared to be backtracking on the FIAs behalf. The only ‘crime’ that McLaren are guilty of (as far as I can currently see) is not managing their drivers well (as a team, I mean) and not managing their staff well (Mike Coughlan, who apparently accepted the documents). That said, Ferrari are guilty of the same crime if it transpires that Nigel Stepney did indeed leak confidential information to another teams employee.

As I understand it now, Fernando Alonso is in the clear as he has cooperated with the FIA. The letter does say that there will be no proceedings against a driver should he assist the FIA with this.

Taking each point on it’s own merit then it would appear that McLaren aren’t being picked on as such. I personally think they got off lightly in the last FIA hearing by having no punishment levied against them, and I think they were right to be punished for running the new gearbox without having it crash tested first – and a fine seems a pretty fair way of punishing that crime, although they weren’t necessarily punished by the correct authority.

The team orders thing was a total nonsense though, and I would agree with anyone who suggested that had it been any other team then they wouldn’t have been brought to task by the FIA over what happened.

Thursday will be interesting – as you say, even though the supposed contents of these e-mails was made up it doesn’t mean that the real content will be any better for Ron Dennis & Co.