Ferrari investigating 'hole nose' leak

It was a metaphor, man. You know, a literary trick, etc...

I´ll re-write it: "I can steal a Ford Pinto right now, because I would have to work for a few months to buy one, it´s more reasonable to just take it".

Other metaphor: if someone stole your work and you lost your customers because the other one can do exactly the same job as you but at a lower price because he just avoided the development costs, would you be happy?

Mmm... this point is hard to debate, as this is almost philosofical. I´ll just say that Formula 1 is not a videogame, and that involves real people, with real money and in real countries of the real world. In an ideal world I could understand your position, but it´s not.

Anyway, let´s suppose that this is an ideal world: even if this is "just a game", the specific rules of the game doesn´t allow copying the rivals.

Again, you´re missing one point: everybody can do a few photos of other cars and copy them. That´s OK and that´s allowed. The problem here is that somebody got some information by illegal means, wich is another story.

 

McLaren, Massa and Alonso were clearly all involved in this, as was Lewis Hamilton. The Spanish racism controversy was a carefully-crafted ruse to deflect attention away from what is actually a Formula 1 cabal determined to bring down the Italian uberteam. Max Mosely stumbled across the plan and, when he threatened the foursome with severe punitive measures, turned up in a grainy sex video yelling Nazi slurs at an actress posing as a dominatrix.

Sheesh. You guys really over think things some times

 

So stealing is OK, and being a NAZI is OK; is there anything that ISN'T considered just peachy keen?

 

It all has gone too far, it's not like the road car operation has been robbed, it's sport and teams do it all the time. Do you really think Ferrari hasn't looked at other teams work as well? The only difference is other teams don't have idiotic laws in thier countries to get the police involved and a lapdog like the FIA to let them do as they please.

 

Probably yes. But they were not caught and there isn´t any solid evidence. So we can´t debate about it.

Things work like that in most countries. At least in Europe there are laws against industrial espionage AND the sporting regulations are always below the laws of each country.

It´s funny: a few years back a journalist made a photo of the interior of the McLaren and Ron Dennis threatened to sue the magazine for industrial espionage. And it was a British magazine.

 

Doesn't make it right though ... I could add some of your replies to my own posts here, and your points are valid to Ferrari also. So you and I are both on the same page and agree, ie: Cheating is fine and perfectly acceptable in F1, just don't get caught.

The problem with your view, and I will never to the day I die agree, is that you think of F1 teams as corporations as though industrial esponiage can exist. Just because the teams are now large numbers of people does not mean they are still not simply race teams. A F1 team has NO customers!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!, so you cannot steal any customers ... (as you discussed in any early post). They have sponsors. This is a SPORT first and foremost, business comes second and is only there to support the sport. F1 teams should not be involved to make a PROFIT but to win. Winning is bragging rights and should come as a loss, fully funded by the parent company (ie. Ferrari selling road cars for example). Heck if they are there to make money, no wonder some teams cannot win!

So yes you advance up the grid by cheating, and it saves you money ... BUT seriously what harm does that do to the sport?. Sure it pisses off the currently winning car, BUT they won't be winning all the time. Yep Ferrari will soon be number 3 team ... and they will desperately want to steal some ideas from, heck maybe Red Bull Racing.

All cheating does is make closer racing, works at solving the spiralling costs involved in the SPORT ... which is something the the FIA has been very stressed about for ages. Its a win win. Witness last year (other than the bollocks about the cheating) which was the best season of F1 in ten years ... thanks to Ferraris performance advantage being reduced. If you want to watch the same team win every race by a million miles, stop cheating. If you want awesome racing, relax a little and let it go ...

AND Ferrari can stop this occurring (from them), simply by locking their doors properly. If they choose to operate like a flea market, then it's their fault that everybody in the world knows their secrets.

F1 only benefits from good old honest cheating. Look back at the 70's and you will see copying of all sorts occurred (and I don't care whether it means that a team has obtained all the drawings or took 2 million photos, cheating is cheating ... and it still takes a few race meetings or seasons to advance from information obtained).
Pete

 

Look: a car manufacturer builds cars for earning money. A racing team builds cars for wining races. A racing team do search a profit. They don´t want money, but wants to win races. What´s the difference?

And if the only one thing that is important is to see nice races and keep the sport alive, hell, why don´t we make only spec races. There is no need of copying, all the cars are the same, it´s cheap because nobody has to do development work and we´ll have lots of fun.

If copying is nice, why then we slam drivers for dirty tactics? So teams can cheat to equalize the competition but not drivers? It was supposed to be a sport... ;-)

 

Well, this is not a debate about the fundaments of phylosophy. But if there is not solid evidence about something, that something didn´t exist. So please, don´t use again that reasoning of "everybody cheats"... We could also debate about if I´m a murderer or not, but as you don´t have any clue about that, there is no point to debate.

 

, as you yourself happily agreed with, everybody in F1 cheats ... even Ferrari.

LOL
Pete
ps: I'll retire from this thread, and atleast many people now agree that Ferrari took the case too far last year. I'm pleased that more can see that now .

 

Well, this is a quite rough... errr, whats the word? ...distortion? twisting? of what I´ve said... And anyway, it was not the center point of the debate.

Hey, come back here and finish this like a man!!!
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How stupid I´ve been! Now I realize that I was debating with a troll.

 

I think i'll jump in here for Pete, lol

So in your view it's ok for Ferrari who's been cheating pretty much throughout thier history in Formula one to cheat, but it's not OK if someone dares to try to cheat them using thier documents? They are far from being saints and the FIA carries a huge Ferrari bias. There are many examples of this, flex wings (twice), getting berrylium banned because they couldn't get any, the McLaren brake steer system which they had banned cause they couldn't figure it out(that's the reason why Ron Dennis threatened to sue over the picture, he didn't want people to know about the second brake pedal), the flex floor they were using last year, etc. They never once got banned or suffered any sort of penalty for using illegal cars. Not so for other teams. Remember MS's ban in 94? The FIA does what Ferrari wants and this is how things get carried too far. Teams that live in glass houses should not throw stones. It's sport, these things happen.

 

Gentlemen, we´re totally loosing the point of the debate.

First of all, I´ve never said that Ferrari are saints. And I´ve never said that Ron Dennis is a satan worshipper. Let´s stick to the facts and to this our little particular problem. Let´s not talk about what Enzo Ferrari made 40 years ago; I´ve already know how many ugly things he made and we could start a different thread about that if you want to.

Second: next time that a cop catch you speeding try to say him: "hey officer, everybody does it, you´ve done it a lot of times..." Let´s see if he just lets you go...

 

This is the whole point that people are trying to make. Firstly, it is not industrial espionage. Like Pete said F1 teams have no customers, it is their job simply to win races, not sell their products (I know that the manufacturers would disagree but really, does anyone think that people bought a Ferrari this year because the team won the title, instead of a Mercedes Benz that they might have bought? Highlyldoubtfull. Also, as far as i know you can't buy an F1 car at a dealership) The think that it is is simply stupid, regardless of what the italian law makers say. These are the same people that have to find someone guilty of something anytime there is a fatality, even if it is an accident, excuse me if i think their laws are a bit stupid.

What happened with spygate last year and what has happened in previous years in F1 or any type of racing is the same thing. The difference being that this case was analized and dissected more than any other. The police and any other law makers should stay the F out of our sport. Period. Now things are getting out of hand.

 

F*ck. I admit I´m getting tired of this. We´re stuck, so I hope we won´t keep this going on for too long.

Just for the record.

YOU, from your quite personal view of what the races are in this world, say that it´s not industrial espionage. For the lawyers of all the world it is, because they don´t care about races and thankfully the laws of the "real world" are more important than any sporting regulation.

And as I´ve said several times, and I repeat now, even if I don´t care if it´s industrial espionage or not, the sporting regulations (the rules of the game) don´t allow that. Maybe you don´t like that rule. OK. But then you have to change the rule, not just "make as it didn´t exist".

That´s a very comfortable reasoning: oh, just blame a few Italian lawyers... I´m not an expert in International Law, but as far as I know, copying is allowed nowhere (except maybe in China, and I think that even in China there is copyright protection for Chinese enterprises).

Ah, and please, don´t start talking about Senna, the Mille Miglia or Von Trips. We shall leave that for another thread.

 

The whole debate is rather pointless. Everyone in F1 cheats in one form or another. It is against the rules, as were a couple of things on the Ferrari (movable floor) in 07 too. Why don't they call the cops for that? I'm not justifying anything, I simply don't agree with police getting involved in matters of sport or the stupid penalty McLaren got because Ferrari whined. Call it industrial espionage or what you wish, it's all bad for the sport. Either way, on with the racing, i'm done with this shyte.

PS Senna, Tripps, or the Millie Miglia are a whole different ball of wax all together but a shining example of Italian law at it's worst, just like now....

 

Only when everyone is traveling in the fast lane on the Motorway here , 70MPH limit, everyone goes faster it's just the norm , so yes the police could pull you for it but .... everyone is doing it, not right but it goes on everyday all year, till they see a speed camera on a bridge slam on cause a pile up...sorry I digress..

 

The centre point of the debate to me is that cheating is actually a very important part of motorsport, not just F1. I have made that very clear in most of my posts, but many who do not think this issue through get their nickers in a twist.

The alternative to allowing a bit of copying, is this: Team A turns up with a car that too closely resembles Team B. Team B sues Team A and everybody looses. Now Team A could have cheated, or Team A could have simply ended up with a very similar design ... heck they are all just about the same anyway.

The other side of this is Team X comes up with a amazing concept that suddenly causes Team X's car to lap 2 seconds a lap faster. The FIA check the car over and over and they have not broken any laws but a particular area of the car has a this new concept. Because of the legal wankers and treating this sport like a corporation that actually has intellectual property laws, NO other team can use this concept for n years. F1 becomes complete joke as Team X wins 5 WDC on the trot. And after 5 years the FIA get pissed and out law this concept ... and thus another clever innovation gets lost to the automotive world. Hardly a good result. Think of the Lotus twin chassis concept for example. Other teams **** themselves because they were not clever enough and a really clever idea was squashed. Now this happened a long time ago, and is not exactly the same but is an example of what happens when other teams start getting intimidated ...

Thus we either allow engineers to think and develop and focus on creating the fastest race car on the planet or we let the legal wankers in and the sport is fncked! Will end up the joke, just like yachting is.

Yes McLaren ended up cheating at the very top of what is possible in regards to cheating ... hardly morally right, BUT the bigger effect on F1 was Ferrari crying about it and underlying the very foundation of "idea creation/idea improved" concept that is to many (especially engineering types) what F1 is about. Ferrari also did not CARE about the cheating, they only cared about slowing McLaren down to bag a WDC win ... way more morally wrong. If Toyota had actually produced a 100% exact Ferrari copy but were not leading the WDC ... nothing would have happened, nothing at all.

Thus we have seen clear proof that Jean Todt and Luca do not care at all about the future and foundation of F1, just winning, just milking the marketing machine and pumping their egos up.
Pete

 

+1 - very well said!

 

-1. I disagree.

 

Good point. But I want to make some appreciations.

We can´t mix the fact that teams need to "imitate" other cars to improve fast and the fact that someone just got access to confidential information from another team.

I meant: in road cars (you know what I´m talking about, copyright, etc...) when someone made the first turbo engine (for example) nobody argued that "it was an idea of another manufacturer" and therefore only that manufacturer could make turbo engines. You can copy THE IDEA, but not rush into the factory to see how they built it, or get direct access to the blueprints wich are kept under secret at the factory.

In racing they keep the design of their car as secret as possible, because they know that if someone understand the way their car works, everybody can copy it freely. And this is the point: if something is deliberately kept under secret, you just can´t "steal" it. You can make photos of the car, or try to figure out how it works when you see it on the track, because as soon as the car leaves the pits, everybody is free to see it and take a look at it (they bother to do private testing behind closed doors for some reason), but if you see some blueprints of the car of a rival team with "confidential" seals on it you should start wondering if those documents have been acquired by "unstraight" means.

Well, I think that everybody here mostly agrees on that. But that is not the point of the debate I think. Jean Todt and Co. should have shut the **** up and let the FIA just APPLY THE RULES. That would be a classy way of making things. But we know that this is not a perfect world, that Jean Todt and Co. are far from perfect and that the FIA oftens just "miss" one of his own rules to make the championship a bit more interesting.

 

Oh, BTW...

A bit of copying? How much is a bit of copying? When the FIA can consider that a team is copying too much?

 

Well, it was just a joke, man...

 

I think you guys need to read this thread back to yourselves again and see that you are getting a bit carried away.
there is two things here, teams will always try and copy what the winning teams are doing as they can see the cars at any time, but someone selling information to make a financial gain for himself ,now that is wrong.
Find the person who is selling the stuff and make an example out of him and lock him up.
Now lets get back to the racing which is what we all watch it for in the first place.

 

I agree this is where it gets very complicated, but I am thinking "concepts" here. Technically speaking we have now given the legal wankers a case to use as precendence to disallow even the most minor copying.


Anthony C.

I am surprised, considering you have watch and lived F1 for a long time, that you disagree that copying is healthy to the sport, and importantly technical advancement.

No invention ever was created in isolation. Ideas grow from other solutions or ideas ...

Please note I accept that morally McLaren massively over stepped the line, but again if we disallow copying, innovation and improvement of ideas in F1 is unfortunately a thing of the past. I don't want that. Maybe they are already anyway. I actually think this ruling on McLaren has accelerated the likelihood of F1 being a spec series within 5 years, as that solves this issue completely. (Maybe this was Ferraris master plan as they are already supplying engines to the A1GP ...)
Pete

 

Agree ... the FIA should have done NOTHING and left it to Ferrari to go after the "money maker".

The FIA made a mistake and now our sport is in danger ... and as I predicted "it" has started already and will now never stop . Wish I was a lawyer, as all teams will need one just for this stuff before the seasons out ... another expense F1 did not need.
Pete