McLaren Excluded

[cosworth151]

In what has to be the most horrendous miscarriage of justice in the history of all sport, the World Motor Sport Council has decided McLaren Formula One Team will be excluded from the 2007 constructors' championship. The team's drivers will be able to continue their battle for the drivers' championship though. The team was furthermore fined for $100 million US. The team is expected to appeal.

Sir Sterling Moss, Sir Jackie Stewart and others in F1 have denounced this travesty. Even Ron Dennis's long time antagonist, Paul Stoddart, has come to his defense.

I never thought I would ever such a blatant case of a motorsport governing body excluding the obviously best team so that their favored team could win. This even puts the 1966 Monte Carlo Rally mess to shame.

Cos

[FW14B]

I love how some areas of the press are now saying McLaren should accept their punishment and feel lucky about it.  So obviously these hacks have no knowledge of F1 and have been moved from the football desks to cover F1 due to Hamilton mania.  Anyone with any knowledge of F1 knows this decision is corrupt.

[raindancer]

I am quite surprised at the amount of fine and double standard with regards to docking mclaren but leaving the drivers their points who drove the car that allegedly benefitted from the Ferrari drawings.
Funny is how I feel with this Judgement.
This is setting a huge precedent and amidst all this we haven't heard about the main protoganists of this affair.

Imagine a Spyker or a Torro Rosso having to pay $ 100 M fine. Ridiculous. I think this will go to the civil courts now.

[Monty]

This is the most outragious decision in recent F1 history and is blatantly unfair and hugely biased. We will obviously never know all of the facts but the main issue is that Nigel Stepney was stupid enough to actually have a hard copy of the technical data. Every team (including Ferrari) are always trying to get technical staff of a competing team to 'jump ship'. This is obviously done so they can gain knowledge from the competitor (e.g. when Jaguar approached Adrian Newey, etc.). Everything we have heard suggests that Stepney brought the data to an individual at McLaren and there has been nothing to suggest that McLaren encouraged this or benefitted from it.
So there is nothing new here apart from Ferrari are using their political pressure to damage a team that are beating them fair and square.

[cosworth151]

I don't recall Toyota getting hit so hard for their Ferarri spying. Should everyone else except Renault loose points and be fined for copying McLaren's zero keel layout?

[Dare]

and the dampers when the Fia tried to make Renault lose

[Steven Roy]

The teams should have set up their own championship instead of doing a deal with Bernie.  That would have left Max to run a Ferrari one make championship where they could have team orders so that Schmacher won every race.

Bring back Balestre.  All is forgiven.

[Chameleon]

Ahah!  Steven gets close to it.  I believe that this episode will prove to be the turning point for the sport and we may yet come to be grateful for the manufacturers being so heavily involved these days.

The manufacturers deal with industrial espionage every day and have it in perspective.  They will not have been impressed with the way the FIA has dealt with the matter and especially that one of the teams clearly has the FIA in its pocket.  They will look back over the last few years and note that every time a team threatened to knock Ferrari off the top, the FIA have intervened with some cooked-up "illegality" or other to stop it.  They will think ahead to the time when it may be their turn to be about to win the championship and the thought will occur to them that something similar could happen at that point.  Mario Theissen's reasoned and careful responses to questions on the matter illustrate how even Mercedes' fiercest competitor is unimpressed with the stupidity and blatant favoritism that has been going on.

I believe that next year we will see big changes in the governance of the sport.  Max will go and many of his compadres on the FIA board.  Bernie may stay but with much reduced powers.  Never again will the decision as to who gets a GP and who doesn't be in the hands of one man.  Never again will the FIA sit in judgement on a matter that has already been scheduled for the properly-constituted civil and criminal courts.  The power of the WMSC will be limited to sporting matters only and the members will be selected in a more equitable way - probably shared out between the teams themselves.

The manufacturers have invested too much money, effort and time in F1 to see it wasted by a governing body that cares only about its members' self importance and power.  Mercedes, BMW, Toyota, Honda and Renault will unite and force the FIA to rebuild itself in another image.  It is the only way they can stay in the sport and justify it to their owners and backers.

Goodbye Max.

[Steven Roy]

I think the fact that FOCA died when Bernie switched sides has a lot to do with the free hand Max has to do what he likes.  The teams need to get organised.

[raindancer]

The evidence that Ferrari information was used by various people or rather was known to people at Mclaren has been published at various sites.
It is clear that espionage occurred and the drivers also knew about it. Time for all of us to admit the facts and stop thinking that this is unfair.

[Chameleon]

Ah, Raindancer, sometimes I think you are the most reasonable and balanced of us all.  But you miss the point in this case.

You are quite correct in saying that the WMSC has ruled that industrial espionage took place and that some, at least, at McLaren knew about it.  But this was not what the committee was convened to rule upon.  McLaren were charged with bringing the sport into disrepute and that was as much as the WMSC had authority to deal with.  They did not address this matter at all, however, preferring to shift attention to the espionage thing that is scheduled to be adjudged in properly constituted civil and criminal courts.  The committee exceeded its remit and strayed into the area of pre-empting the legal process.

The WMSC is not a court of law; it is a committee set up by the FIA to rule upon disputes regarding the sporting code of motor sport.  It has no business deciding whether or not McLaren was guilty of industrial espionage - that is a matter for the courts.  It could also be pointed out that the arrangement is a highly unsatisfactory one since, almost invariably, the WMSC is called upon to rule on complaints put by the FIA.  This is as if the plaintiff in a legal case were to be allowed to select the judge and jury; it is no surprise that the WMSC has never ruled against the opinion of the FIA.

The actual charge, that of disrepute, is very hard to prove and even harder to disprove.  It seems to me that most people await the verdict of the legal systems of Britain and Italy before deciding whether McLaren has been guilty of industrial espionage.  Until this is ruled upon by a proper court, McLaren cannot be said to have brought the sport into disrepute; they may be innocent and the public image of F1 go up as a result.

You cannot say to me, therefore, that McLaren have been found guilty of espionage - I will wait for a legal verdict on that before I decide.  You may wave any number of emails in my face and I will be unmoved; their authenticity and admissibility as evidence is a matter for the courts to decide, not the WMSC.

What has happened is that the WMSC has abrogated legal rights to itself that are not theirs.  It has failed completely to address its remit - to establish first that the sport has been brought into disrepute and then that it was McLaren that caused this.  It seems to me that, if any disrepute has occurred, it is the fault of the FIA in so publicly airing matters that are the concern of the courts, and not the public at this stage.

We may, like the WMSC, be misled by the emotions of the moment into believing that McLaren have been proved guilty of a crime.  They have not, at least, not by any properly constituted court of law.  They have been charged with one thing and been convicted and sentenced for something else entirely by a motor sport committee.  This is the real reason for feeling shocked and angry, not the ridiculous and political nature of the sentence.

[Steven Roy]

Clearly some people in McLaren had access to Ferrari data.
Clearly some people in Toyota had access to Ferrari data.

No-one at McLaren has been convicted as a result.
Two Toyota employees were convicted in a court of law.

McLaren have been heavily punished by the FIA despite never having any history of illegality.
Toyota have been let off completely by the FIA despite this being the same company who were banned from rallying for having a deliberately engineered illegal device on their cars.

That is my complaint.

[raindancer]

Fair enough guys ! Point taken.
Lets enlarge our views a bit more. I agree that a properly constituted court is where Mclaren should have been found guilty ( if they were guilty). But the WMSC is probably an arbitration institution that was set up so that every party approaches the Civil Courts and sabotage the efficient running of the Championship.
Having Ferrari data by a rival team employees is definately unsporting.
If someone is question this institution of the WMSC they would probably flouting some other agreement they have signed that gives the powers to take such decisions. Mclaren for instance shouldn't have subjected itself to this hearing and decided to wait for the courts. However there will be an agreement which effectively disbars Mclaren if they do not comply with the WMSC ruling. This can argued both ways and I am not attempting to argue one way or the other but just to point out that mclaren did not deny the existence of e-mails and Ferrari data with a few of their employees.
There are grounds here. However I do not or cannot comment on the WMSC charter.

[johnbull]

In a nutshell, the FIA was taking on responsibilities it had no right to take.

The fact that it continues steamrolling pompously like it does, is doing nothing but putting people off F1.

For the first time in over 40 years I didn't bother watching the GP last Sunday. And I didn't miss it. Instead I attended a hill climb and met lots of old friends who were happy talking motorsport, and not trying to get back at each other. I was in Sicily, and even there some Italians admitted that the FIA should not be interfering in legal matters.

The whole thing disgusts me.

[Chameleon]

Raindancer: McLaren did not dispute the existence or authenticity of the emails because they, like the WMSC, do not have the authority or knowledge to do so.  If Ron was telling the truth, and I believe he was, he had no idea that there was any evidence of Ferrari data being used at McLaren because, to his knowledge, it had never happened.  He was hardly in a position to argue when the emails were produced.

But did anyone question the admissibility of email evidence or its authenticity?  No, because the WMSC is not supplied with the the necessary structure to investigate such things.  They accepted them without question yet you and I know that it is easy to fake emails.  And the Italian police evidence has no bearing on this either; Mosley himself has admitted that they had nothing until the drivers' emails appeared.  If the drivers' emails had been authenticated by the police evidence, the fact would have been shouted from the rooftops, be assured.

So all this talk of McLaren being found guilty of espionage rests entirely on a few emails (and the number of other emails is irrelevant since they did not prove McLaren guilty) that we could have forged without difficulty on our home computers.  The law is a notoriously conservative institution and it is quite possible that emails, as a fairly recent innovation, will not be accepted by the court as admissible evidence.  Even if they are, they will be subjected to scrutiny by experts (geeks) to ascertain their authenticity.  If they cannot be found on a server out of the control of those who submitted them, they will be ruled out as unproven.  Bang goes the WMSC's only evidence and oops goes everyone else who has agreed that McLaren has been found guilty and fairly punished.

No sporting committee has the right to abrogate matters of law to its authority.  This is exactly what the WMSC has done and there is no getting away from it.