Team Excluded From Constructor’s Title, But Not From Drivers’ Championship

SPA-FRANCORCHAMPS, Belgium — The FIA’s World Motor Sport Council has fined Vodafone McLaren Mercedes a whopping $100 million and kicked the team out of the 2007 world constructor’s championship because of the spy-gate scandal.
However, Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso have been allowed to keep their points and will be able to contest the drivers’ world championship.
McLaren will not have to pay the entire fine directly because the amount of money the team will not earn from points prize money [said to be about $50 million] will be deducted from the overall amount due. Still, McLaren’s final accounting will show a loss of 100 million.
Initially, McLaren escaped punishment in the spy scandal as the WMSC decided that while McLaren’s rogue employee Mike Coughlan had received confidential information from Ferrari’s Nigel Stepney, the team had not known or benefited from the data.
However, when the FIA received fresh evidence, it reconvened the WMSC on Sept. 13 in Paris. The tip-off of the new evidence came from none other than McLaren boss Ron Dennis who informed the FIA about it on Aug. 5, the morning of the Hungarian Grand Prix.
The initial case centered on the 780 pages of secret Ferrari data that Stepney passed to Coughlan in June. But in fact Stepney had been feeding Coughlan information as far back as March. An investigation by Italian police noted that at least 288 text messages and 35 phone calls passed between Stepney and Coughlan between March 11 and July 3.
A number of e-mails between Coughlan, Alonso and test driver Pedro de la Rosa [but not Hamilton] reveal that they had access to confidential Ferrari data.
“All the information from Ferrari is very reliable,” de la Rosa told Alonso in an e-mail on March 25. “It comes from Nigel Stepney, their former chief mechanic — I don’t know what post he holds now. He’s the same person who told us in Australia that Kimi [Raikkonen] was stopping on lap 18. He’s very friendly with Mike Coughlan, our Chief Designer, and he told him that.”
On March 21, de la Rosa sent the following e-mail to Coughlan: “Hi Mike, do you know the Red Car’s Weight Distribution? It would be important for us to know so that we could try it in the simulator. Thanks in advance, Pedro.”
Coughlan replied in detail.
In a 15-page statement from the hearing, the WMSC said it was “clear that Coughlan’s actions were intended by him to give McLaren a sporting advantage. He fed information about Ferrari’s stopping strategy, braking system, weight distribution and other matters to McLaren’s test driver.”
The WMSC also believes that the “a number of McLaren employees... were in unauthorized possession of...highly confidential Ferrari technical information.”
All this evidence led the WMSC to impose the draconian penalties on McLaren. The drivers were granted immunity because they cooperated by supplying copies of their e-mails, etc. But no matter how stiff the team’s punishment, it’s difficult to believe that the FIA and Bernie Ecclestone would damage their own world championship by kicking the drivers out as well.