Yesterday, I began looking at this year’s new F1 teams. This was following Ferrari’s controversial blog post and the news surrounding some of the new teams that has dominated the F1 news websites.

Yesterday I looked at the good aspect of the process — the relative success of Lotus and Virgin. Today, I turn my attention to the bad and ugly sides.

The bad side of the process

Campos’s fall from grace

It is unfortunate for Campos. At first they were regarded as among the most credible of the new teams. But unfortunately the money seems not to have been coming in. It looks as though the team has been saved. This week, as part of the process, its name was changed to Hispania. And today the car was finally launched.

But the car won’t get any proper running until it arrives in Bahrain for the first race, which doesn’t bode well. The last time a Formula 1 team turned up to a race without having tested was Lola in 1997. Running up to six seconds off the pace, the Lola remains one of the worst F1 cars of recent years.

Campos had previously run a successful GP2 team, and had signed a big name driver in the shape of Bruno Senna. For whatever reason, though, the prospect hasn’t brought in the sponsors.

Up until very recently, the driver line-up was still uncertain. For a period, it seemed as though Bruno Senna wasn’t safe. I do wonder if, counter-intuitively, Bruno Senna has been hindered by his name.

I have an immense amount of admiration for Bruno Senna. For my money, he was the class of the GP2 field in 2008. Yet, look at the other GP2 drivers from that season who have made the transition to F1 on more solid foundations: Lucas di Grassi, Romain Grosjean, Sébastien Buemi, Vitaly Petrov. Now you can add Karun Chandhok to that list.

I guess teams avoided hiring Bruno Senna for fear of being accused of only signing him up because of his name. So instead, shaky drivers like Jaime Alguersuari get parachuted in.

Hopefully Bruno Senna will be able to make something out of this mess. Considering he was unable to race for ten years in his youth due to his family’s wishes, he has done an amazing job to become as good as he is.

The situation at Campos / Hispania has been messy, and it’s clear that the team almost failed to make it. But it looks as though things are coming together. The new team principal Colin Kolles has experience in running a lean team from his Midland / Spyker / Force India days. Meanwhile, former Red Bull and BAR / Honda technical director Geoff Willis is also linked to the team.

We’ll have to wait and see if the Dallara chassis is any good. But while Campos were unable to pay the bills, there can’t have been too much work being done on it.

USF1: Another kick in the teeth for American F1 fans

The situation is even worse for USF1. Regarded very early on as a clown-like team, things have gone from bad to worse. It has to be said that Peter Windsor often comes across as someone with a rather child-like over-enthusiasm. Apparently we can add child-like naivety to his list of qualities too.

It seems as though Peter Windsor was genuinely the last person in the world to twig that USF1 wouldn’t arrive in Bahrain with a car. Stories from disgruntled USF1 employees have been leaking out for weeks now. The verdict on his management of the team, along with that of his business partner Ken Anderson, is damning.

With just weeks to go until the first race in Bahrain, USF1 was left with no car, and having done no testing. Peter Windsor was allegedly in tears when he broke the news to its sole announced driver, José María López (a driver who, incidentally, has not raced an open-wheel single-seater in anger for four years). He has apparently been lying low, having not been seen at the factory recently.

This week, when USF1’s employees were finally put out of their misery and told that the game was up, neither Peter Windsor nor Ken Anderson were present. When considering also the news that USF1 apparently had offers to save the team, but the shareholders rebuffed all of these efforts, I begin to assume that this entire exercise was all about ego, and nothing to do with any of the patriotic clap-trap they came out with.

Yesterday, the FIA finally kicked them out of the championship, too late for a more credible team such as Lola or Prodrive to be brought in. That didn’t stop one shady outfit from sniffing around though…

The ugly side of the process

Second hand car business Stefan GP

Serbian outfit Stefan, led by Zoran Stefanović, originally attempted to enter F1 along with the other teams last summer. It was not viewed as credible by anyone. It was noted that the way Stefan went about securing an entry was rather unconventional. For instance, they did their best to upset the FIA by complaining about the entry process itself — which won’t exactly get you in the FIA’s good books.

However, fast forward to this winter. Quietly, Stefan has secured the intellectual property to Toyota’s car, with the manufacturer having recently pulled out. Clearly, actually having a car is a fairly good weapon in an F1 team’s arsenal, particularly considering that certain teams (not naming any names, but I’m talking about USF1) did not even have a car, despite having been preparing for at least a year.

With the shit hitting the fan at USF1’s factory in Charlotte, Bernie Ecclestone was apparently trying to help Stefan make it onto the grid in an attempt to keep the field full. The trouble was that, despite having a car, Stefan still wasn’t terribly credible.

Their preferred form of communication was by bizarre press releases bemoaning everyone and everything in broken English. And when they attempted to test their car a couple of weeks ago, everything was all set, apart from the minor fact that they forgot to arrange a tyre supply!

And I hardly know where to begin with the drivers Stefan are rumoured to have been talking to — the likes of Jacques Villeneuve and Ralf Schumacher. Michael Schumacher’s comeback is cynical enough, but at least he is talented and has the ability to come back after a few years away. Jacques Villeneuve couldn’t even spend half a season away in 2004 without coming back even worse than normal.

All-in-all, this entire process hasn’t been F1’s proudest moment. And Formula 1 in recent years is littered with bad news. Here is hoping that Jean Todt will manage to bring some sense into the FIA’s processes. I won’t hold my breath though.

Update: Read more about the dodgy Stefan operation.

One of the stories that emerged during the recent Olympic Games was the extraordinary diet of Michael Phelps who won eight Olympic gold medals this year. The swimmer takes in an incredible 12,000 calories per day. Here is his intake for the day:

• Breakfast
  • Three fried egg sandwiches topped with cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, fried onions and mayonnaise
  • Two cups of coffee
  • Omelette made out of five eggs
  • Bowl of grits
  • Three slices of french toast sprinkled with sugar
  • Three chocolate chip cookies
• Lunch
  • Half a kilogram of enriched pasta
  • Two large ham and cheese sandwiches of white bread with mayonnaise
  • 1,000 calories of energy drink
• Dinner
  • Half a kilogram of enriched pasta (again)
  • A whole pizza
  • 1,000 calories more of energy drink

All I can say is, with a breakfast that big I hope he doesn’t have to commute!

This extreme diet reminded me of another extreme diet I read about earlier this year. It is not uncommon to hear about drivers stacking up on the pasta — the carbohydrates do them good over long distances.

But pasta is a big no-no for Robert Kubica nowadays. The pole is among the tallest drivers in F1 at 184 cm. That can be a major disadvantage in a sport where teams are always looking to trim unnecessary weight so that they can put ballast in the best position for the performance of the car.

There is also the fact that the cockpit of an F1 can be quite a confined space. Alexander Wurz was unable to deputise when Juan Pablo Montoya had his “tennis injury” a couple of years back because the Austrian still couldn’t fit into the McLaren car! In 1995 Nigel Mansell also struggled to fit into his McLaren, though that was probably more because he had grown outwards!

Over the winter, Robert Kubica went on an extraordinary crash diet which allowed him to lose an incredible five kilos in just five weeks. That is amazing for someone who looked so gaunt in the first place. This weight loss is said to be a major factor in his competitiveness this season. Here is a typical day in Kubica’s regime according to an article by Peter Windsor in the June 2008 issue of F1 Racing.

• Breakfast: fruit
• Lunch: A 50p-sized piece of chicken with some carrots and a sprig of broccoli
• Dinner: “A forkful of protein”

(A 50 pence piece is 27.3 mm in diameter.)

“No carbs. No dairy. Nothing artificially sweet.”

The prospect of eating so little throughout the day would be bad enough for me, never mind being banned from carbohydrates! Like Michael Phelps, Robert Kubica has had to display tremendous self-discipline and commitment. It is just another reason why Robert Kubica is surely a future world champion.

I am making this the last in my series of posts looking back on the 2007 Formula 1 season. Truth be told, I’ve become a bit sick of writing them every Sunday. I skipped last week. Anyway, next Sunday is in a different year, and it’s a bit off to be looking back when everyone else is looking forward.

Anyway, I promised I would review Formula 1 websites, so here goes. Again, this is all in alphabetical order.

Autosport.com

A reliable source of Formula 1 — and other motorsport — news. It is also the most frequently updated of the F1 RSS feeds I subscribe to. So chances are that if something has happened, Autosport will have the story.

There is also a neat ‘Autosport TV’ feature, containing highlights of certain motorsport events. Bernie take note — this is how things will be done in the future, so don’t leave F1 lagging behind every other series!

Unfortunately, not all of the content on Autosport.com is free. But you can’t have it all. The website also performed badly on the day of McLaren’s WMSC hearing, when the website was down for huge parts of the afternoon, and then when it came back up it got the story wrong. Oh dear.

BBC Sport | Motorsport | Formula One

The BBC’s F1 news website is as you would expect — solid, but not really in-depth enough for obsessives like me. Only the very biggest F1 stories appear on BBC Sport Online, and they seldom contain anything revelatory.

Having said that, there are some neat features from time to time. Heikki Kovalainen wrote a regular column. I also particularly enjoyed reading an article about Kimi Räikkönen’s playboy image! There is also some good video and audio content collected from the BBC’s output.

However, the stories and features also concentrate too much on Lewis Hamilton. I guess this is to be expected from the BBC, but it’s all a bit fawning and not very balanced.

As for the other features, again they are pretty good, although they haven’t changed much for several years. I would imagine that features such as the pitstop guide are excellent resources if you are just getting into the sport.

BlogF1

Ollie White’s BlogF1 was the first Formula 1 blog I started reading regularly. The posts strike a neat balance between news and opinion, although I personally prefer more opinion-heavy pieces.

I have to confess that nowadays my favourite feature of BlogF1 is the weekly caption contest. However, there are some other neat features hidden away from the main blog area.

There is a particularly comprehensive section on racetracks from around the world, complete with images from Google Maps. There is also a stunning complete list of championship statistics going all the way back to 1950, the inception of the Drivers World Championship.

F1 Insight

This excellent blog is, as its title suggests, very insightful. What I love about it is the fact that Clive doesn’t just churn out banal posts about the issues of the day. Instead, he finds an interesting angle and then writes about it, bringing to the reader’s attention an aspect that he may not previously have thought about.

To take some recent examples, there is a post questioning Sebastian Vettel’s reputation as a promising driver. And here is an interesting take on Fernando Alonso — is he going to be the greatest reputation-maker of all time?

In sum, F1 Insight is guaranteed to challenge the conventional wisdom, making it an essential read.

F1Fanatic

Without a doubt, the best Formula 1 blog around! What astonishes me is that you can visit the website every single day and there will be something new — even in the depths of the off-season. There was even a new post on Christmas Day, but you are just as likely to find three or four new posts per day even at this time of year.

The breadth of features is also breathtaking. Book and DVD reviews often appear. The Lapped Legends series takes a look at some of the less talented drivers and teams in F1’s history. And the ‘F1 in the Blogs’ feature is a must-read roundup of the best F1 blogging. The blog has also been known to hold competitions which I have been lucky enough to win!

Main writer Keith Collantine is clearly very dedicated to the website and infinitely knowledgeable about the sport. It could so easily fall into the trap of being a haven for stattos, but it actually strikes a perfect balance between geek heaven and accessibility.

Ah, and I have also had a guest post published on F1Fanatic. So obviously it’s a must-read!

Formula 1 Blog

This is the Formula 1 Blog as in Negative Camber and Grace, whose podcast I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. The blog is rather different to their podcast. You would never guess that it was the same thing. The long, in-depth podcasts are accompanied by very concise, brief, pithy blog posts.

Despite the difference in style, the blog is great for all the same reasons as the podcast. Priding itself on being a “journal of opinion”, forceful opinion is certainly what you get.

One problem is that you have to be registered to comment. This is okay, and understandable in an age where upwards of 95% of blog comments are spam. But I tried to register and never got my confirmation email, so I am locked out (well, not really, but I can’t be bothered going through the rigmarole of registering again). Okay, so it’s not the end of the world, but it is a bit off-putting.

As well as the blog, there is a forum which I hear is buzzing. But forums are not quite my thing.

Formula1.com

This is the big daddy — Bernie Ecclestone’s Formula 1 website. It has come on leaps and bounds in the past year.

The best bit is still the Live Timing facility. If you have access to a computer during a grand prix, having Live Timing open will keep you up to date, with access to pretty much all of the information you would want, updated in real time.

The news section is so-so, but this is more than made up for by the site’s other features. A particular joy is the technical section, which looks in detail at the developments each team makes throughout the season. There is also great information on each circuit, a fine image gallery, profiles on all the teams and drivers and — for the bravest among us — a good section on F1’s Byzantine rules.

Perhaps the strongest part of the website, though, is the database of past races results, stretching right back to 1950. An excellent, in-depth resource if you want to look up old race and Championship results.

However, this section suffers from a frustrating navigational quirk. Say I want to look up the past results of a driver. I can select the driver, say Kimi Räikkönen. Now I want to look at his results from 2002, so naturally I select 2002 from the drop-down menu. But this takes me straight to the Championship Table of 2002, not the results of Kimi Räikkönen. What a pain!

Little annoyances aside though, Formula1.com is better than you might expect. It is finally catching up with other motorsport series. Now FOM needs to move into offering video on the website urgently. An insipid, 30 second long ‘highlights’ clip (which inevitably focuses on the crashes rather than the racing) will not do. Bernie needs to offer more video content online in future. If he is going to take all the interesting videos off YouTube, he had better offer them on Formula1.com.

Fun F1

A fair attempt at an F1 humour website, although not the best.

GrandPrix.com

One of the best F1 news sites going. This website might not have the budget or the big-name status of, say, Autosport, but it undoubtedly has the contacts.

Often the stories are as much about rumours as they are about hard facts. But this is often to its advantage. I seem to remember that GrandPrix.com was the first website to announce that Kimi Räikkönen had signed for Ferrari. Some other websites laughed at the suggestion at the time, but GrandPrix.com was proved right.

It was also consistently ahead of the curve in the reporting of the Stepneygate scandal. You simply had to read GrandPrix.com to keep on top of the facts surrounding the issue. Remarkable reporting.

ING Renault F1 Team – Weblog

A fine companion to the Renault podcast. Once again it demonstrates that Renault are serious about reaching fans in ways that other teams don’t consider. The blog is properly done as well, not half-hearted and with a buzzing comments section.

The design is rather busy for my liking, but to be fair I am not the biggest fan of the content either (unlike the podcast, which is excellent). Nevertheless, this is a lesson to the other teams: this is how it should be done.

ITV Sport – F1

This season saw the ITV-F1 website turn from a reasonable, accessible guide to Formula 1 into a central cog of the Lewis Hamilton hype machine. No doubt it is good for raking in the advertising money, but it is awful for genuine F1 fans.

Nevertheless, there are some top features on the ITV-F1 website. For instance, there are regular columns from Peter Windsor and David Coulthard. And Ted Kravitz’s notebook is often worth a read.

Next year I expect nothing less than a Lewis stalking feature which will plot on a Google Map where Lewis Hamilton is at this precise moment in time.

Linksheaven

A reasonably good Formula 1 group blog.

Pitpass

A fine independent Formula 1 website. Like GrandPrix.com — a reliable news resource, although Pitpass has a much slicker design! I have to say though, it is rather annoying that you can’t copy any of the text if you want to quote it. I can’t think of any other websites that persist on using this user-unfriendly technique that treats normal users — even people like me who want to approvingly link back — as criminals.

I would also rather that the news feed did not contain stories about that awful tripe known as A1 Grand Prix. Yeah, that toytown motor racing series where drivers don’t win, nor do teams — but countries do. What a load of nationalistic gash!

Apart from that, the news reports are good. The opinion pieces are fine, but often come across as a bit curmudgeonly. And the endless predictions of the imminent death of Formula 1 do get tiresome after a while.

Sidepodcast

A great blog to accompany a great podcast! They have recently had a new lick of paint. That’s all I can say. A cracking read, just as much as the podcast is a cracking listen.

Sniff Petrol

The best attempt at a Formula 1 humour site. This site provides some much-needed light relief amid the turmoil and politics of an F1 season.

Highlights include Crazy Dave Coulthard (complete with entertaining descriptions of what Red Bull tastes like), D.I. Blundell’s latest report and the latest advice Michael Schumacher has given to his brother.

Times Online Formula One blog

Ed Gorman’s Formula 1 blog is easily the best of the MSM F1 blogs. I do hope it returns for the 2008 season. I imagine it will because apparently it has been very popular indeed.

I can vouch for that. I think I can thank the comments section of Ed Gorman’s blog for a few of this blog’s readers nowadays. It is still to this day one of my top referrers. Infact, it is the top referrer to this blog all year apart from Google Images UK. And this is all from the comments sections of two posts from October. Blimey.

One problem was that it came to be defined in terms of its (oddly) mostly Spanish readership clashing with Ed Gorman’s British perspective on events. Thankfully in the end the relationship appears to have become the more respectful, ‘agree to disagree’ type, rather than the antagonistic relationship it could have been.

I think that’s about it, mostly because I am losing the will to live. As are you, most likely. Er, any other suggestions, blah blah, etc.?

I am quite reluctant to write about the week’s off-track events in the world of Formula 1. Originally I wanted things to settle down before I wrote anything. But ever since then, things have steadfastly refused to settle down. A few people come along to kick some dust into the air and the whole issue is flipped on its head again. Hopefully things have at last settled down now.

First things first. The evidence against McLaren was fairly damning. In the original hearing, McLaren’s defence was that Mike Coughlan was a rogue employee and that no other employee had access to any confidential Ferrari information. Furthermore, most of the evidence pointed to Nigel Stepney and Mike Coughlan intending to use the documents at Honda, where they jointly applied for a job, rather than McLaren.

The new evidence demonstrates that there was, to an extent, an intention to use Ferrari information to guide development at McLaren. Pedro de la Rosa and Fernando Alonso also knew about the documents and discussed information from them. And, as the WMSC pointed out (points 3.10, 3.11), it is highly likely that other employees must have known about this.

Otherwise, the implication is that Pedro de la Rosa has the sole say on which weight distributions get tested on the simulator and whether to try out a special type of gas on the tyres. Common sense says that somebody else other than the test driver is involved in these decisions.

However, this also conclusively proves that Ferrari information was not flowing among McLaren employees freely. My guess is that Mike Coughlan probably knew that he would end up in big trouble if enough people found out that he had special access to Ferrari information.

It is notable that Pedro de la Rosa — somebody who Coughlan will have known since his days at Arrows — is at the centre of all the email conversations. He was clearly being used as a kind of middleman between Coughlan and whichever other employees de la Rosa was working with.

Perhaps it was Coughlan’s intention to keep the Ferrari documents to himself all along. It is possible that he accidentally let it slip to his friend Pedro that he was in regular contact with Nigel Stepney. From then on, de la Rosa’s curiosity forced Coughlan to look up the documents and the rest we see in the emails. de la Rosa let his compatriot Alonso in on the secret. This explains why Lewis Hamilton had no incriminating emails.

And it is still possible that no other employees were aware of the Ferrari documents, although de la Rosa was providing helpful suggestions to his colleagues. In this sense, the McLaren team is no more guilty now than it was in July. It was just the actions of one (or two or three) rogue employees in a company which must have several hundred employees.

What the new evidence also reveals is that the Ferrari data was probably not much use to McLaren anyway. The revelations about weight distribution suggest that the Ferrari data was so different to what McLaren was used to that it was deemed useless for their car to the extent that Fernando Alonso doubted the accuracy of the data. It backs up what I said in my previous post on this subject — that it would be like putting together pieces from two different jigsaws.

There remains precious little evidence that McLaren actually did use any of the Ferrari data in the end. It’s a shame that, because of the way this story has been presented by the media, most people seem to think that McLaren were found guilty of “spying” on Ferrari and copying Ferrari parts and therefore having an illegal car.

McLaren were actually found guilty of the catch-all “bringing the sport into disrepute”. This (along with the fact that all of McLaren’s drivers provided the FIA with the relevant emails) explains why the drivers have kept their points while McLaren have lost all of theirs. It is close to the prediction I made in my previous post — that McLaren would be punished heavily while Hamilton (the story of the season, remember) would get away scot-free.

It is cynical of the FIA to do this. But there was not much else they could do. They had got themselves into a situation where they had to punish McLaren, but at the same time they did not want to jeopardise the story of entire season (the emergence of Lewis Hamilton and an exciting 3- or 4-way title battle). It is fair, though, for the drivers to keep their points as they have not been driving an illegal car.

A lot of the problem came down to the fact that the WMSC had to be seen to be punishing McLaren harshly. The media latched onto this story in an unprecedented way, and in many respects it was sensationalised and blown out of proportion. As such, the punishment is suitably sensationalised and overblown.

The $100 million fine was clearly designed to attract headlines, not least because this is nothing like what McLaren will have to pay. Some of the money will come out of the earnings they will lose as a result of being thrown out of this year’s Constructors’ Championship. McLaren won’t even have to pay half of the $100 million.

Another aspect of the coverage that has annoyed me is the way that it has become known as “spygate”. You will notice that I continue to call it by its original name, “Stepneygate”. Why? Because there was no spying going on! Mike Coughlan did not break into Maranello and hide in Jean Todt’s cupboard. He was approached by a Ferrari employee, Nigel Stepney, and from there a relationship was formed.

No bugs. No wiretaps. No covert break-ins. Just one Ferrari employee exchanging information with one McLaren employee. As far as I am concerned, this all began with the wrongdoing of a Ferrari employee, not the McLaren team. It begs the question once again — why were Ferrari not also charged with bringing the sport into disrepute? It was their employee who started this whole sorry episode. A rogue employee, yes — just like Mike Coughlan.

In fact, if anyone has been the victim of spying, it is Nigel Stepney. Earlier this year he claimed that he feared for his life after finding that he had been bugged. He says he was also involved in “Mafia-like” high-speed car chases and subsequently fled Italy.

This is where the whole tale becomes darker. Clive at Formula 1 Insight says that certain articles on some websites have mysteriously disappeared. I am certain of this as well, because I can not find any reference to Stepney’s car chase claims on the reputable F1 websites that I read, although I am certain that I must have read of them there.

This leads us nicely onto conspiracy theories. The FIA’s institutional pro-Ferrari bias is well known and barely contested by anyone except the most blindly ardent Ferrari fans. For instance, the World Motor Sport Council — the body that found against McLaren on Thursday — has more representatives from Ferrari than any other team. The governing body’s constant attempts to rig the championship in Ferrari’s favour has done far more to place the sport into disrepute than anything Ron Dennis or McLaren have done.

A lot of people are asking why McLaren have been so harshly punished. One of the things that I am reading time and time again is that this sort of thing is apparently fairly commonplace in Formula 1 (although perhaps not to the same extent). I mentioned Peter Windsor’s comments on this blog before (near the bottom of the post).

Many are also drawing parallels with the incident that involved Toyota a few years ago. The FIA stayed well away from that — the whole matter was kept to the Italian courts.

So, why have McLaren been singled out in this way? The FIA’s pro-Ferrari bias can’t explain it all. The Toyota case also involved Ferrari blueprints. Obviously, the way the media latched onto the story explains part of it. But the media latched onto it for a reason. Ferrari pushed this for all it was worth and asked the FIA to get involved (unlike the Toyota case). But was there something else at play?

Many claim that FIA president Max Mosley has a personal vendetta against Ron Dennis. Mosley didn’t do much to change this perception with his comments at Spa yesterday morning (awkward photo opportunity or not).

It seems to me that Max Mosley’s comment that the large fine was designed partly to “bring… his [Ron Dennis's] budget down to the level of some of the other top teams in the paddock” backs up this notion that Mosley is anti-Dennis and pro-Ferrari. It sounds like a calculated plan to damage McLaren and help its rival teams.

Paul Stoddart certainly put in more than his two cents in a must-read interview with Pitpass. Stoddart was an old nemesis of Max Mosley, but he was hardly best pals with Ron Dennis either. It is notable therefore that Paul Stoddart should come out so strongly in Ron Dennis’s favour.

As an aside, note Stoddart’s claim that Max Mosley was the person who prevented there being a proper race at Indianapolis in 2005. He and Jean Todt were the only people who were not willing to compromise for the sake of the sport. Even Bernie Ecclestone was so incensed at Mosley’s stubbornness that he threw his phone at him. This is a real (albeit thoroughly unsurprising) insight into Max Mosley’s character.

Speaking of Max Mosley, Ron Dennis and character, another thing I have read about time and time again is the integrity of Ron Dennis. It is difficult to imagine Ron Dennis cheating or knowingly allowing cheating to go on in his team. He is clearly a proud individual — not just proud of himself, but proud of McLaren as well.

His company has a strict policy whereby the drivers are treated equally. This had already got the team into trouble at least twice this year (at Monaco and Hungary). Still, Ron Dennis refused to deviate from the policy.

Well, seemingly it is the equality stance that has landed McLaren in the deep doo-doo that it has found itself in. Apparently Fernando Alonso confronted Ron Dennis on the morning of the Hungarian Grand Prix. He told Ron Dennis about the incriminating emails and threatened to hand them over to the FIA unless he was made number one driver.

It is interesting that Ron Dennis preferred to hand over the information himself rather than capitulating to the powerful Alonso’s demands. He risked the reputation of his team to preserve the integrity of his team. Very, very admirable. Allegedly, Alonso and Dennis have not spoken since the incident.

It has to be said, this casts Alonso in a very bad light. Not only did he sit on incriminating information, but he also effectively blackmailed his boss in an attempt to get preferential treatment. I bemoaned Lewis Hamilton’s arrogance a few weeks ago, but Fernando Alonso is obviously not squeaky clean either.

I am just glad that there is a race tomorrow so that hopefully this whole sorry affair can be put to rest at last. For some light relief, check out this amusing animated version of the Stepneygate saga (via Ed Gorman). The captions are all in Spanish (or something), but I can still understand it all perfectly!

You know, I didn’t think the FIA or the World Motor Sport Council had it in them, but they’ve managed it — they have actually made the right decision. Moreover, they have made a decision that has angered Ferrari! Blow me down!

While the media has been tempted to spin this as motorsport’s governing body letting McLaren off the hook, this misses an important point. There isn’t much evidence that McLaren have done anything wrong. The saga remains an issue concerning two rogue employees — Mike Coughlan of McLaren and Nigel Stepney of Ferrari.

There is no evidence that McLaren have benefited at all from the Ferrari documents. Indeed, there is not even evidence that the documents were ever in the possession of any McLaren employee except for Mike Coughlan. And while, as chief designer of McLaren, he was a pretty important figure, he can not have had the time to do much with the documents anyway.

Somebody yesterday said to me that it was a bit fishy that McLaren have come up with a fast car this year. But Mike Coughlan came into possession of the documents in late March — long after this year’s McLaren was designed; even after it first raced. And it is not as if it is unusual for McLaren to design a fast car. Indeed, it has been overdue, as they have experienced an unprecedented drought of success in recent years.

You only need to take a glance at the Ferrari and the McLaren to appreciate that they are not similar cars. The joke normally goes that if you gave all of the F1 cars the same paint job you would be unable to tell them apart. But the chassis of the Ferrari and the McLaren are very noticeably different to each other. Seemingly, nothing on the inside of the cars has rung alarm bells either.

There is the possibility that some Ferrari information was used in the development of the car as the season has gone on. But McLaren’s incredibly open offer to hand its car over to the FIA for inspection shows just how confident Ron Dennis was that his team had not broken the rules. The fact that the FIA have seemingly found no evidence of copied Ferrari parts vindicates this. Ron Dennis is a meticulous and honest man, and McLaren’s record is about as unblemished as they come.

Furthermore, a careful reading of the saga as it has drawn out has revealed that McLaren was never going to be the team where the Ferrari documents would have come in handy anyway. The most likely scenario is that Stepney approached Coughlan with a view to creating a “dream team” of engineers who would approach Honda.

Stepney in particular, and presumably Coughlan as well, were disillusioned with their employers for whatever reason. In Honda they would have seen the perfect opportunity: a team with a big budget and in desperate need to extra engineering and technical expertise.

They were looking for a boost in pay and status, and saw Honda as their best option. The Ferrari documents merely formed part of their arsenal. Honda are in the clear though, as they did not hire Stepney or Coughlan.

And Stepney’s involvement is important. GrandPrix.com has suggested that McLaren may have argued in court that if McLaren are to receive a penalty because of Mike Coughlan’s actions, then Ferrari ought to receive a similar penalty for Nigel Stepney’s actions. Given the lack of evidence of McLaren actually benefiting from the documents, this seems like a sound argument to me.

Given all of this information, it would have been pretty difficult for the WMSC to justify any draconian punishment for McLaren. Yes, Ferrari are livid. But this is typical of Ferrari. It is tough to think of a year in the past decade or so where Ferrari have not resorted to the rulebooks and the courts in an attempt to win the championship.

I will pluck just a few examples from the top of my head. The illegal bargeboards at Sepang in 1999: cleared by FIArrari. The sudden appeal against Michelin tyres towards the end of 2003, despite the fact that they had been used for almost two years: upheld by FIArrari. Last year’s claim at Monza that during qualifying Massa was being “impeded” by a Renault that was half a kilometre further up the track: supported by FIArrari.

Usually Ferrari’s whining succeeds because the FIA are Ferrari lackeys. This is why Jean Todt’s claim that Ferrari would have been punished if they were in the same situation is so laughable.

This latest saga is yet another example of Ferrari trying to win the championship through the many grey areas of the rulebook rather than the grey surface of the race track. What a breath of fresh air for the FIA to go against Ferrari’s wishes. It further demonstrates how little evidence there must have been of McLaren wrongdoing.

It is also worth remembering that McLaren have not gone completely unpunished. The FIA will be keeping an eye on them for the next two years to check for an evidence of the Ferrari information being used by McLaren. If McLaren step out of line, they face immediate exclusion from the championship. This is surely a fair verdict. As Ron Dennis said yesterday, “the punishment fits the crime.”

Keith Collantine has come to a similar conclusion to me, and makes a number of interesting points.

Ferrari claimed that the verdict creates a damaging precedent. They’re wrong. Imagine if McLaren had been docked points, even banned from the championship, simply because Coughlan was found to have Ferrari documents in his possession, without having used them.

We would then have a scenario where any disgruntled employee could hold their team to ransom by claiming they possessed similar confidential documents about another team.

In all legal systems, there has to be a dividing line between the companies’ responsibility and the individual’s.

Now for a bit of tin foil hat stuff. Where has this all come from? Many observers have noted how difficult they found it to believe that such well-regarded figures as Nigel Stepney and Mike Coughlan would get involved in this kind of behaviour. Whatever their motives, there is little doubt that it has not paid off, as their reputations are in tatters and they both face lengthy bans from motorsport.

There is, indeed, a real whiff of fish around this entire saga. Sidepodcast outlined a number of the aspects that just didn’t add up. A good point is made about the whistleblower who contacted Ferrari, said to be a worker at a Woking photocopying shop:

here’s a challenge. pretend you’re the copier guy, try and call the Italian team, see how many hoops you have to jump through to get in touch with them. then see if they even respond, let alone believe what you’re claiming.

i’m damn sure if it were me the first call i’d make would be to the police…or failing that, the Daily Mirror. this guy could be worth a fortune now!

final point. where is this mysterious tipster and why isn’t he talking? what a great story he would have. the tabloids would love it, especially on the weekend of the British GP. we’re not getting half the story here.

Here is something else that has got me scratching my head. It is this month’s ‘Friction Circle’ column in F1 Racing, written by Peter Windsor. He is a bit of an FIA / Ferrari lackey, but he is also a wise man whose word and experience are surely to be trusted. Here is what he said:

…espionage is alive and well in F1 and has been for the past couple of decades. I’m not talking about ‘cloned’ cars such as the Benetton–Ligier or the current Newey or Honda chassis. I’m talking deliberate industrial espionage — and I speak from the experience of having worked in F1 teams for a total of eight years during that period. I saw it with my own eyes — the evidence of senior employees sending drawings to destinations that could only be described as arch-rivals. It was blatant, obvious, but the F1 world just seemed to take it for granted.

…

A big thank you, then, to Ferrari, McLaren and Honda — and especially to the FIA — for giving this most recent matter the publicity and sincerity it deserves.

Now this is surprising to me, because almost every other experienced observer that I have read has written about how unbelievable they found the entire situation. Yes, they say, spying is normal. Taking photographs of rival cars is standard practice. But industrial espionage on this scale? “I’m shocked, just shocked!”

So is Peter Windsor right? Is industrial espionage the norm in F1? If it is, why has nobody said anything about it before? Why hasn’t Peter Windsor himself ever said anything about it?

Assuming Peter Windsor is right, this just adds on another question to the never-ending list. Why have Stepney and Coughlan been singled out, while similar behaviour has been “taken for granted” in the past?