Thursday, December 6, 2007

F1 spy rows set to reach climax


Renault will appear before the FIA on Thursday to answer a charge of unauthorised possession of confidential McLaren technical data.

The French team deny the information was used in their 2007 car.

McLaren, who have been found guilty on a similar charge, face further scrutiny on Friday on the Ferrari controversy.

McLaren were fined £47.5m and thrown out of the constructors' championship after being involved in an earlier spying controversy involving Ferrari data.

However, after punishing the team in September, the FIA said it would investigate further to ensure that no Ferrari data appeared in next year's car.

The FIA is expected to reach a verdict on Renault's case on Thursday but a decision on McLaren's fate is unlikely to be made until Friday or even next week.

And on the eve of the hearing, McLaren were dealt a blow in their case against Renault when they were forced by the FIA to clarify allegations made about Renault in a document prepared by their lawyers and leaked to British media, including the BBC.

McLaren submitted a dossier to the FIA which alleged that the files were discussed by up to 18 Renault F1 personnel, including a group of senior engineering chiefs and heads of department.

But they were forced to admit on Wednesday that in fact "13 Renault F1 employees had provided 18 witness statements and nine of them have so far admitted they viewed and discussed the confidential technical information belonging to McLaren".

McLaren also said it was "wrong to say that the information was loaded on to 11 Renault computers. In fact, it was copied on to 11 computer discs by former McLaren employee Phil Mackereth.

"A back-up copy of the material on Mr Mackereth's personal directory was made on to an unknown number of Renault's back-up servers/tapes".

Only two Renault employees, one of them Mackereth, admitted to viewing the McLaren information on a computer screen. The others said they saw it on print-outs or hard-copy documents.

McLaren had also claimed the information taken to Renault by now-suspended Mackereth included 780 individual drawings on computer discs.

"This was an error," the McLaren statement said. " The information [was] taken... on floppy discs, in hard-copy form and by e-mail amounts to 762 pages when printed out. The 11 computer discs included 18 individual technical drawings."

McLaren also stepped back from the earlier document's claim that the information amounted to "the entire technical blueprint of the 2006 and 2007 McLaren car".

"This requires clarification," the McLaren statement said.

"The position is that the McLaren drawings plus the information in a confidential... document taken by Mr Mackereth constitute a technical definition of the fundamental layout of the 2007 McLaren car and the technical details of its innovative and performance-enhancing systems."

Renault deny any of the data was used in their 2007 car and claim every effort was made to erase the information from their systems.

They have admitted the information was brought to the team by the now suspended Mackereth, who loaded it onto their F1 file system "without the knowledge of anyone in authority in the team".

"None of this information was used to influence design decisions," said Renault in a statement. "We have acted with complete transparency towards McLaren and the FIA, been proactive in solving this matter and we are fully confident in the judgment of the world council."

The verdict in the Renault case will be watched with interest by double world champion Fernando Alonso.

The Spaniard's former team are one of his few options for a drive next season following his acrimonious split with McLaren, but a severe penalty could well put him off re-joining the outfit with which he won his titles.

Once the Renault matter is dealt with, the world council will turn its attention to McLaren's 2008 car and whether it contains any Ferrari information.

A team of independent legal and technical experts visited the McLaren headquarters in Woking last month to assess the team's design for next season's Formula One car.

The world council will view this information before deciding whether to impose any further sanctions on the team.

FIA president Max Mosley has suggested that any further sanctions could take the form of a "negative points allocation" for McLaren at the start of next season, although F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone has distanced himself from such a scenario.

"What Max said after the last World Council Meeting was that if the FIA found anything on the McLaren car, they could be penalized," he said.

"But they have got to have found something in there for a start and then the World Council has got to agree it."


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