McLaren suspends key technical employee in ferrari probe

Tricky one that imagine if the supposed stolen designs had turned the car into a death trap. its not the drivers fault .. they are in the hands of designers and could pay with there lifes ..

 

Agreed but like i have said earlier thats life and corrupt as it is let us hope to see some good racing this weekend even with this cloud of doom and gloom

 

Actually I didn't say it is meaningless. The season so far did indeed have a lot of meaning in the sense that we saw how Kimi under delivered, how Massa exceeded expectations (at least mine) and how unbelievably fantastic Lewis is.

The seasons' results will be negatively affected, tarnished and always with a dubious cloud hanging over them. Which is really really sad as the opening stage for super talent Lewis. He deserves a better entrance for his reign, but such is life.

As I said before, Michael Schumacher had a tainted first championship, but that didn't really affect his reputation in the long term. I think ten years from now we will say the same thing about Hamilton when we'll look back on his many WDCs won over the years.

 

Speed TV announcer (Matchett) during Fri practice say that Coughlan is history and that MCL has such a fine group of engineers there that they will be able to go on just fine without him.

 

Paolo,

Bad as it is, it is nothing compared to the mess of professional cycling. And the Tour de France starts tomorrow, first time I have ever NOT given a ratsass.

This is just a little industrial espionage. It doesn't taint the honor of the drivers at all, and it doesn't change that F1 is still the most advanced form of motorsport on the planet. F1 will move past this with little hesitation.

Best regards,

-J.

 

Yes but thats the US
we are talking about Europe here!!!
and yes they should be banned for the season if its true

 

Well said sir i do most agree

 

Yes it is a sad footnote for LH's rookie season, but it may not have even been a "reign," as you put it, without the cheating.

McLaren, LH and FA may have been floundering with Renault and BMW for 3rd and 4th place championship points without the info that they have illegally acquired.

If there is more than one person from McLaren found to be involved and the amount of money paid, as has been reported. I say the only fair response from the FIA would be to DQ Team McLaren for at least the 2007 season.

 

You forgot Alonso?

Ahem? Try asking what the members with SENNA in their user name think of him..(again )

 

Alonso is doing fine, but didn't really surprise me either way.

Had Senna lived, the 1994 season obviously would have been different, but MS' time would have come eventually. Just as Lewis' will eventually *IF* they take away his points this year.

 

Whats sad about all this is that the behind the scenes action is more exciting than the racing itself!

 

Ron Dennis' statement that only one MCL employee has seen the SF documents is total BS. Now there are reports that it was a MCL employee who noticed the SF logo on the documents they were copying and reported it (to whom?). Copies? For whom? How Many??

Stay tuned. RD's lies are going to cost him. As with Watergate, the coverup of Stepneygate is worse than the crime because then you never know if anything Dennis tells you has any truth to it.

What a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.

 

...if THAT comes to be truth, I mean the McLaren worker seeing the Scuderia logo on some of those documents well...away they go! I guess there will be nothing left to be said.They will HAVE to be DQ.

And then Ron Dennis will need to explain how he didnt knew anything about it...

 

It almost did Clinton in and it is going to cost McLaren.

In the light of the recent revelations (content of the 500 pages plus multiple McLaren folks involved) I no longer think this will be a minor footnote to the season, but might become a major event with implications for the Championship.

Maybe Kimi will become WDC after all. But not exactly the way I anticipated it.

 

Truth is that the copy machine at McLaren headquarter broke. The IT guy was dragging his feet because he was busy surfing for porn on the net. Mr. Dennis then told his empolyee to take the docuements to FedEx/Kinko's down the street to make copies. This is where all hell broke lose as the machine jammed due the shear size of the doucments (~500 pages). As faith would have it, the FedEx/Kinko employee who came to help in fixing the jammed paper was Ivan Capelli's ex-engineer during the Ferrari dark days, thus still harbors deep seeded hatrate toward McLaren, Williams and just about anything not Ferrari.

Incidentally, for those of you F1 fans that may not be aware of: FedEx/Kinko's is one of the McLaren sponsor now, but they used to be with Ferrari. McLaren/RD Stole FedEx/Kinko's away from Ferrari because they are still upset how Ferrari stole all the good engineers away from Bennetton years ago.

 

...latest from F1 live...this site is sponsored by TAG heuer, and of course McLaren...so I guess they have no intention on burying themselves deeper...



A third team is being dragged into the Ferrari-McLaren espionage affair - Honda.

The German specialist publication Auto Motor und Sport now reports that, in addition to McLaren, Ferrari veteran Nigel Stepney had also offered classified team data to his colleagues at the Japanese team, but they turned him down.

It is additionally rumoured in the Silverstone paddock that both he and McLaren's suspended chief designer Mike Coughlan intended to defect to Brackley based Honda, and that the Nick Fry-led outfit intend to clarify their position with an official statement later on Friday.

Auto Motor und Sport says the sacked Stepney and Coughlan were trying to pool information and also proposing to bring a group of engineers to Honda, who were targeted as a struggling but well-funded operation that could offer high profile and highly paid jobs.

It is also suggested that McLaren's managing director Jonathan Neale tried to prevent the affair from exploding by asking Coughlan to destroy the stolen Ferrari information before it had been copied or used or fully analysed...

...if this come out true, HONDA will come out clean and fair...but McLaren will be even deeper in this mess...

someone menitoned before...what if things were backwards and Ferrari had some McLaren info...my gosh...

 

http://www.grandprix.com/ns/ns19384.html

Now Honda gets involved

The full extent of the scandal, which Formula 1 is now calling "Stepneygate", is about to drag in the Honda F1 team as well as McLaren and Ferrari. There were rumours in the Silverstone paddock on Friday that the Japanese team will make some kind of statement about the situation shortly.

Stepney had two meetings with Honda F1 team members at the end of April. In these meetings he proposed taking a group of top-level designers and engineers to Honda to help the team get on the pace after the disappointing start to the season. Stepney's package would have put him in a very senior position, earning more money and more recognition than was the case at Ferrari. It would also have provided higher profile jobs (and presumably more money) for the others involved. It is believed that one member of this mysterious group was the senior McLaren designer who has been caught up in the scandal but there are believed to be at least four others who were included in the offer. Our sources at Honda say that the team did not discover the identity of the people mentioned as negotiations did not go far enough as Honda had developed its own plans to hire a different selection of engineers. A number of these appointments have since been made public.

This would help to explain possible motives for allegations that Stepney was passing information to the McLaren man, but it also raises additional questions about the identity of the others involved and whether other data might have been gathered from other teams.

It is unlikely that Honda would have been directly offered any of the information involved but such data would obviously have made the group better equpiied to do a good job for their new employer.

 

Interesting - so at the last race we will see only Ferrari and Spyker on the grid ?

 

Sounds like Stepney will be going to the big house.

 

He will forever be known as the man who brought F1 down, sort of like Yoko Ono will forever be the one who broke the Beatles up.

 

You just insulted Yoko Ono (I'm a big Beatles fan and can't stand Yoko Ono).

They should lock Stepney into the darkest tower and throw away the key.

 

Did you see the practice on speed today ? They said that the person noticed who noticed the SF logo is an employee of local copy center.

So the facts as far as I understand:

Stephney who is filling disgruntled for not getting Ross Braun job - negotiating a job with Honda and offers to bring other senior people with him.
One of of these people is Coulagh - who may be also feeling disgruntled passed for promotion after Adrian Newey left McLaren
Stephney sends Ferrari documents (which he may believe he is a rightfully owner of) to Coulagh.
Coulagh not willing to take these documents to McLaren office - goes to local print shop to make a copy - employee (the person not related to F1) sees the Ferrari logos and alerts the team.

If that is what happened - the case boils down to if Steepen had "ownership" rights to documents and if not - is termination of employment the maximum penalty ?

Meanwhile press try to use the facts in a way to sell more copies.

 

Kirill here may have a point. Either way, Stepney has been a very bad boy!

 

No. Stepney committed a crime: Transfer of proprietary data to another company for monetary gain.

This is no longer "just F1" and "just a disgruntled coworker". This is somebody selling himself to the highest bidder by offering company secrets.

Whatever the FIA will do in the F1 sandbox will be peanuts compared to what the Euro courts will do to him. He is going to jail.

 

So that would be the mysterious person "outside Formula 1" blowing the whistle...



The way things develop it seems to me that the McLaren team itself indeed is not involved in the whole plot, as Coughlan might have gathered the information he got from Stepney to boost the chances of their renegade group of engineers...