http://sport.guardian.co.uk/motorsport/story/0,,2209013,00.html By Maurice Hamilton Sunday November 11, 2007 The Observer Considering the turmoil that has followed McLaren every step of the way during 2007, the team was an oasis of calm on Friday while other parts of Formula One seemed ready to implode as yet another spy scandal rocked the sport. The irony is that while McLaren were named as the aggrieved party after many key pieces of their engineering information were found to have been in Renault's possession, Lewis Hamilton's team carried a bemused air while going about preparations for the first winter test session in Spain and a court case concerning another F1 legal matter in Paris this week. Details of Renault's alleged transgression were made public by the FIA and perhaps the McLaren directors were musing over the size of the rod that the sport's governing body appeared to have made for its own back. McLaren's reputation and bank balance remains numbed and depleted thanks to the beating delivered by the FIA when charging the British team with gaining a sporting advantage from information leaked by a disaffected Ferrari employee. The stripping of all championship points and imposition of a $100m fine set a hefty precedent that may prove difficult for the FIA to follow since, on paper, Renault's alleged crime appears just as serious. The FIA statement claims that Renault had in their possession the layout and critical dimensions of the McLaren F1 car, together with details of much of its inner workings. Renault have explained that a former McLaren engineer, Phil Mackereth, brought the information on floppy disks when he switched teams in 2006. A Renault statement said: 'This information was loaded at the request of Mr Mackereth onto his personal directory on the Renault F1 Team file system. This was done without the knowledge of anyone in authority in the team. Mr Mackereth was immediately suspended from his position. Subsequent witness statements from the engineers involved have categorically stated that having been briefly shown these drawings, none of this information was used to influence design decisions relating to the Renault car.' That was almost a carbon copy of the statements emanating from McLaren earlier this year when discussing the receipt of information from Ferrari by their former chief designer. Unlike the Renault case, none of the Ferrari details got as far as McLaren's computers. If McLaren were punished so heavily on the suspicion that Ferrari information may have been used, then the penalty due to Renault should be similar. Whatever the verdict, this case, along with the McLaren/Ferrari spy scandal, brings a new dimension to the age-old problem of employees moving from one team to another and taking valuable information with them. Formerly, those sensitive details may have been in the engineer's head but the substitution of computer disks or, in the case of Ferrari and McLaren, a 780-page document, has changed the complexion entirely. Thursday's court case reverts to the more simple matter of two teams, Williams and BMW, having used fuel that was below the legal temperature during the final race of the season in Brazil. The cooler the fuel, the faster it flows into the car's tank and the more power it can produce. BMW and Williams, rather than looking for a performance benefit, probably made an error but, regardless of the excuse, McLaren are appealing a stewards' decision since McLaren's view is that the rules had been broken. If McLaren are successful then the fourth-, fifth- and sixth-place cars in Brazil will lose their championship points. In theory, Lewis Hamilton could move from seventh to fourth and win the championship. That is not the object of the exercise and neither Hamilton nor his team would want to win the title that way. This is an old-fashioned and straightforward question concerning the implementation of a clear-cut rule. That, at least, makes a change from some of the confusion concerning intellectual property rights, the inconsistency of occasional savage punishment and the knock-on effect of making F1 look disorganised and foolish. Copyright Guardian News and Media Limited 2007 __________________________________________________________________ Visit InfoSec News http://www.infosecnews.org/
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