Formula 1's "Spygate"
England and Italy, 2007
This case is a work of fiction. The characters, names, places and events in the game do not portray real people. The account below is a factual summary, based on public sources, of the case that served as inspiration.
In February 2007, the English mechanic Nigel Stepney, who had been Ferrari's chief mechanic and part of the winning team of the late 1990s, left the races and moved to a development role at the factory, after saying publicly that he was unhappy with the team's reorganisation. In June, Ferrari filed a complaint against him in the courts of Modena and, on 3 July, dismissed him.
The same day, Ferrari announced legal action against a McLaren engineer, chief designer Mike Coughlan. According to the accusation, he had at home some 780 pages of Ferrari technical documents, and his wife had taken the material to a copy shop near Woking, in England. A shop employee realised the papers were confidential Ferrari documents and alerted the team's headquarters in Italy, which until then had not known about the leak. A search of the engineer's home found the documents, and McLaren suspended him.
Sources
In the game
Kart Box
Turin, Monday, 25 June 2007, 10 pm. In the boardroom of the Scuderia Ardesia factory, two printed sheets lie on the table: the drawing of the 2007 car's floor and the weight distribution table.
At a first hearing, on 26 July, the international federation concluded that McLaren had the information but did not punish it for lack of proof of use. In September, emails between the team's drivers surfaced showing that Ferrari data had circulated internally, and on 13 September 2007 McLaren was excluded from the constructors' championship and fined 100 million dollars, the largest fine in the history of the sport. Stepney admitted to the federation that he had passed on information and, in 2010, was sentenced in Italy to one year and eight months, a sentence he never served.
