It's a dirty, dirty business in F1

Clamour forces FIA to mount new probe

Sep 13, 2007

Motorsport Columnist

If he’d done that back at the beginning of the summer, it’s possible — quite likely, even — that Formula One wouldn’t be in the mess it’s in today.

But because he didn’t, his beloved Team McLaren is in the soup. It’s been stripped of all its manufacturers’ championship points for this season and may not be awarded any next season (which means it will lose its travel subsidies — money awarded to teams on the basis of points earned).

McLaren was also fined $100 million (U.S.) — an astounding amount of money to us mere mortals, but about one season’s primary sponsorship for a top F1 team.

And the sport is in turmoil.

Industrial espionage — and this is what McLaren has been mixed up in — is serious business. Any person, company or corporation that plunges into such a quagmire does so at their peril and most people know it.

A couple of summers ago, when two employees of Coca-Cola approached U.S. rival Pepsi-Cola and offered to sell it the formula for a new drink that Coke was developing, it took about a minute for Pepsi to call Coke.

Coke, in turn, notified the FBI and those two now-former employees are serving eight and five years, respectively, for their crime.

Here’s another example.

Many years ago, founding Toronto Blue Jays president Peter Bavasi was talking to a reporter and absent-mindedly left his briefcase behind when the conversation ended. The reporter took it back to his newspaper (not the Star) and went through it.

The managing editor found out. Not only did he order the briefcase returned immediately, he fired the reporter from the baseball beat and forbid anyone at the newspaper from writing stories based on materials in what was, essentially, a stolen briefcase.

That’s how you handle those sorts of things.

Not Ron Dennis.

When the story broke that Ferrari employee Nigel Stepney had been feeding team secrets to McLaren designer Mike Coughlan — which goes back to at least the beginning of this season and who knows how long before that? — Dennis said he knew about it but wanted to assure everybody that McLaren had not made use of any of the information.

This was from a guy whose team didn’t win a race last season but is just about unbeatable this year.

This was from a guy whose team filed a protest over Ferrari’s “movable floor” after the first race of the year in Australia, which resulted in the FIA outlawing the design and which set Ferrari back on its heels (and had Ferrari wondering how in the world McLaren knew about it? Autosport magazine subsequently reported that Stepney emailed Coughlan before the season started and tipped him off .)

So it’s been a dirty, dirty business all along, but all Dennis would say — and continues to say — is that anybody who knows him knows he wouldn’t cheat.

He told that to the FIA’s World Motor Sport Council, which held a hearing in July to determine wrongdoing. They found McLaren guilty of possessing the secret documents but, in an inexplicable decision, decided there would be no penalty because they couldn’t find any specific instance or example of McLaren misusing the information.

This resulted in an unholy uproar in Europe. North American media don’t much care about motorsport, so we didn’t hear a lot about it over here, but they were tearing their hair out overseas because, how in the world can you be guilty of something and not receive some kind of sentence, even if it’s one that’s conditional or suspended?

Although it was wrong and stupid, you can understand the FIA wanting initially to sweep this under the rug. After all, somebody (McLaren) was finally challenging Ferrari for supremacy on the race track. And there was a great fight on for the world championship because the brilliant rookie, Lewis Hamilton, has been having probably the finest first year of any driver in the history of the sport.

And you can even have some sympathy for Dennis. Here’s a fellow who — back in the 1960s with guys like Bernie Ecclestone and Frank Williams — shared cold-water flats in London and slept in the back seats of cars at the circuits in order to scrape together enough money to go racing.

But as they built the F1 sport through to the turn of the century, these men became rich beyond their wildest dreams and with that sort of success comes arrogance of ownership (“our sport”) and a sense of entitlement (“I say I’m innocent and so should you”).

Within the tiny, insulated world of the upper echelons of motorsport, then, it probably made sense to find guilt (how could they not?) but to waive the penalty in order to protect everybody’s investment.

Unfortunately for them, this is the real world. In the real world, somebody has to pay the piper sooner or later. Because the court of public opinion was so loud, the FIA subsequently decided to allow an appeal of the non-penalty against McLaren.

That became a whole new hearing on Thursday as the result of fresh evidence surfacing.

The decision not to penalize the drivers will, you can bet, result in a whole new uproar. Fernando Alonso and Hamilton are winning, after all, because the team has apparently been cheating. Not to penalize them, innocent or otherwise, is not right.

There will be appeals.

And yet it might never have come to this if, back when he found out, Ron Dennis had simply picked up the phone and said: “Hello, police? McLaren calling. We’ve got a problem.”