In June, Italian authorities started an investigation into Nigel Stepney, one of the chief technicians of the Ferrari racing team. As it turned out, Stepney had passed classified information about Ferrari’s cars to Mike Coughlan, the chief designer of McLaren. This wasn’t just a late-night slip of the tongue: 780 copied pages of Ferrari technical information had been found in Coughlan’s home.
In early September, fresh evidence surfaced. Coughlan had shared his information with two McLaren drivers, including reigning world champion Fernando Alonso, as e-mail and text messages showed that were later released by the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA). On Sept. 13, the World Motor Sport Council levied that $100 million fine, and stripped McLaren of all its points in the Constructor’s Championship, which is awarded to the team whose drivers have accumulated the most points. Although the team could still win the Driver’s Championship, being booted out of the Constructor’s race is a very humiliating punishment in technique-obsessed Formula 1. McLaren officials said they decided not to appeal the verdict “in the best interests of the sport.”
Stealing other teams’ ideas has always been part and parcel of Formula 1 racing. The European teams do not necessarily follow the notion of “fair competition” accepted in American racing: each year, tens of millions of dollars are invested in obtaining that crucial technical edge over adversaries. During the races, designers are continuously peeping at each other’s vehicles—they even hire photographers to record every detail of the other team’s car on the grid. “The stakes are so high in Formula 1, that open spying is well accepted,” says American F1 journalist Dan Knutson, who reports for ESPN and other outlets.
So the $100 million penalty surprised many. For context, the total number of fines levied in America’s NBA in the 2004-05 season only totaled $14 million. In NASCAR, the highest fine ever levied was $100,000, according to Knutson.
Why was the verdict so brutal? The real truth behind the ruling may be the towering might of McLaren’s nemesis, Ferrari. Based in Modena, Italy, Ferrari is F1’s true Grand Dame. The Scuderia (“stable”) has participated in every single F1 Grand Prix since the championship’s founding in 1950. They own nearly all the significant records in F1: most wins, most pole positions, most Constructor’s Championships. Their idiosyncratic red fireballs were driven by legendary champions like Alberto Ascari and Niki Lauda. Over the past decade, Ferrari racer Michael Schumacher basically reduced F1 to a one-man show by clinching five consecutive championships. Ferrari is, in short, the racecar equivalent to the New York Yankees: everyone knows them, everyone wants to work for them and a lot of people envy them.
McLaren, by contrast, has a much humbler ancestry. Founded in the late 1960s, the team had its fair share of success in the 1980s with drivers like Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna. But the last decade and a half has been meager, and McLaren has never even approached the universal adoration that Ferrari enjoys. McLaren’s principal since 1982, Ron Dennis, is a former garage owner from Woking, England, whose somewhat convoluted English is dubbed Ronspeak. (The deceased Enzo Ferrari, legendary founder of the Scuderia, contemptuously referred to McLaren as “the garage team.”)
This season, the tables seemed to have turned. Dennis put together an extraordinarily roster, luring world champion Fernando Alonso from Renault and introducing 22-year-old prodigy Lewis Hamilton to F1. Between them, Hamilton and Alonso have won half of this year’s Grand Prix races, and they are now front runner and runner-up in the championship (with three more races to go). This was going to be Dennis’s big year—until disaster struck. Dennis immediately acknowledged the “unauthorized possession of documents” by his team. But he also insisted that the information was not used to gain advantage for McLaren’s cars. Dennis says he was unaware of the secret information obtained from Ferrari. “The ruling has hit Ron hard,” says Knutson, who has attended every Grand Prix race of this season. “You can see it—he’s lost weight. He’s certainly had a lot of stress.” (Asked for comment, McLaren officials said they have stated everything they wanted on the issue; Ferrari did not reply to requests for comment.)
The whole affair has stirred up long-standing anger about a supposed bias toward Ferrari from F1 leadership. Max Mosley, the body’s long-serving president, maintains very close relations with the Italians. Under his reign, the FIA is widely believed to have favored the Grand Dame at several occasions. At the 2005 U.S. Grand Prix in Indianapolis, McLaren and other teams using Michelin tires were forced out of the race after several Michelin-shod teams had crashes during practice. Critics said the FIA yielded too easily to Ferrari pressure to go ahead with the race instead of finding a way for the teams with Michelin tires to compete. In the end, Ferrari’s team secured an easy victory in Indianapolis, plus 18 points for the Constructor’s Championship.
British F1 journalist Mike Lawrence points to another case. This April, two ex-Ferrari employees received suspended prison sentences for handing Ferrari data to the Toyota Formula 1 team. “I do not recall the FIA becoming agitated about the Toyota case, yet two people have been found guilty in a court of law,” writes Lawrence, one of the doyens of F1 journalism, on the Web site pitpass.com.
The FIA disputes that Ferrari had anything to do with either case. “At Indianapolis, Ferrari was not involved,” says an FIA spokesperson. “And unlike the McLaren affair, the Toyota incident was never reported to the FIA.”
“This time, the FIA’s interference is so blatant even a blind man can see it,” says Paul Stoddart, an Australian millionaire and owner of American Champ car team Minardi. He is a very unlikely supporter of McLaren’s cause; when Stoddart was still in F1, he and Dennis were often in verbal conflict. But now Stoddart, whose nickname is “The Thorn,” tells NEWSWEEK that Dennis has become a victim of FIA’s Ferrari bias. “There are great people at Ferrari, don’t get me wrong,” he says. “But the people in charge want to get the championship, no matter how. They think it’s self-evident they should win.” In the past, Stoddart says, critics have joked that FIA stands for “Ferrari International Assistance.” “Today, unfortunately, that is the truth.”
