The infamous 'spy gate' that began during the 2007 season is now one step closer to being closed for good, with a court hearing in Modena, Italy, dropping charges against the McLaren employees. The employees involved being McLaren chief designer Mike Coughlan and senior employees Paddy Lowe, Jonathan Neale and Rob Taylor.
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monkeyboy1976 wrote:Let's just hope that Lewis is not involved....
Involved in what? If a Ferrari team member tells something to Mclaren team member what is Mclaren team member supposed to do? Ignore what he knows and don't use it? It is not Mike's or De la Rosa's or Alonso's or Hamilton's fault that a member of Ferrari team told them something or gave them something. They didn't spy on Ferrari. Spying is premeditated operation. Person who accidentally learns a secret is not a spy but just a person who accidentally learned a secret.
I think it is still too early to judge what exactly is the extent of their involvement, as we don't really know what's in those e-mails exactly.
Even if we assumed you were right, manchild, and this was a case of "a person who 'accidentally'(?!) learned a secret", how can you be so sure it was something they over-heard (although this is clearly not the case)? Who said it couldn't have come directly from the dossier?
The beauty of this entire matter, if I may call it that, is that Mclaren are slowly getting themselves into a checkmate situation. We started this whole thing with them saying that it was only Coughlan who stunk (and somehow people keep forgetting that on top of the e-mails he may have received from Stepney he consciously made a digital copy of that dossier and burned the original one, so there are no accidents there). Then we discovered that some other high-profile team members knew a thing or two but chose not to actively act or just wouldn't go out of their way to prevent it from leading to these catastrophic results. Now with this late developments we might find out that even the drivers knew about this whole thing, as they apparently used them for car setup, which also means that their engineers and mechanics might have known a few things. If this turns out to be true, ignoring the spy case completely, Mclaren have shamelessly lied to everyone. In my view, that alone would demand punishment.
One of the main points of this huge discussion we had here was that the chances of finding a solid proof to the possibility that Mclaren actually used the information they had was almost impossible. This might be the end of that assumption if this turns out to be true.
monkeyboy1976 wrote:Let's just hope that Lewis is not involved....
Involved in what? If a Ferrari team member tells something to Mclaren team member what is Mclaren team member supposed to do? Ignore what he knows and don't use it? It is not Mike's or De la Rosa's or Alonso's or Hamilton's fault that a member of Ferrari team told them something or gave them something. They didn't spy on Ferrari. Spying is premeditated operation. Person who accidentally learns a secret is not a spy but just a person who accidentally learned a secret.
Its funny how you can tell exactly what a person is going to say by a glance at their avatar.
Come on guys, surprise me.
Murphy's 9th Law of Technology:
Tell a man there are 300 million stars in the universe and he'll believe you. Tell him a bench has wet paint on it and he'll have to touch to be sure.
Simon: Nils? You can close in now. Nils?
John McClane: [on the guard's phone] Attention! Attention! Nils is dead! I repeat, Nils is dead, ----head. So's his pal, and those four guys from the East German All-Stars, your boys at the bank? They're gonna be a little late.
Simon: [on the phone] John... in the back of the truck you're driving, there's $13 billon dollars worth in gold bullion. I wonder would a deal be out of the question?
John McClane: [on the phone] Yeah, I got a deal for you. Come out from that rock you're hiding under, and I'll drive this truck up your ass.
During the Friday FIA press conference at the Circuit of Monza, Mario Almondo (Ferrari), Willy Rampf (BMW Sauber), Pat Symonds (Renault), Geoff Willis (Red Bull)
(Stéphane Barbé – L'Equipe) To all of you, as technical directors who are working very hard to get performance from the car how high would you rate in terms of cheating the fact that a team could have obtained technical information from another team?
GW: "I suppose I have the advantage of having looked from the outside… (This is) a very difficult question to answer. When you are designing a car, particularly when you are looking at your competitors, it is certainly one of those things that you want to know – where is the other person's advantage – is the aerodynamics better, or is the car lighter or is the centre of gravity lower or is the engine more powerful.
So, in some ways, knowing that information or some of it helps you to focus a bit more on where you develop the car and in the absence of that information all the teams are doing a lot of competitor comparison analysis to try to focus on exactly where their shortcomings are. We do that all the time.
If you were to take the extreme condition of having detailed information about somebody else's car, in some cases it would be a huge advantage and in other cases it would just be enabling you to produce what that team had already produced and therefore you would always be playing catch-up, however good your manufacturing and design and operations loop is, it is going to take you four to six weeks to get those sort of components on a car and fundamentally what you want is an understanding of why you have come up with those engineering solutions and not what those solutions are…
So, for me, if an engineer comes to me from another team, I am not interested in his specific technical knowledge about that car, because it should already be out of date. I am interested in how he arrives at that design and what made the car go fast. So, ignoring all issues about the morality and legality of it, I am not sure how much use in certain cases some information is. In other cases, it is a lot of use."
PS: "I agree very much with Geoff. What makes a car go fast is reasonably well known and reasonably easy to simulate and therefore the way in which we approach our development is weighted with respect to the lap time improvement one can get in different areas.
In other words, we all know that good aerodynamics makes a Formula One car go very fast, so we put a lot of effort into that. We know at the moment, there is very little we can do with the engines, so that effort is scaled down. Even when it was free, we know that for each million Euros you spent on the engine, you produced less performance than a million Euros spent on aerodynamic development.
We all understand where we should be spending our money and putting our effort in and in what proportion and we are trying to do that as much as we can in the budgets that we have and the personnel that we have. So, information from another team doesn't really help you in that respect and equally neither does detail.
And that is where I agree with Geoff – what's important in a team are the people and the way people approach things, and to have even a complete set of drawings of a car, if you don't understand the concept of how it works, then it is not terribly interesting."
WR: "The performance of the car is an overall part of a complex system, so if you bring in one engineer from another team and maybe he has some ideas, but overall on the long term I don't think that you would make a big step forward as long as he is not working well in the team or integrated in the team.
Sometimes I think it is over-estimated what input can be made to another team. It is like increasing a team when the whole team has to work well and all with a lot of trust together to make a quick car. So it is not one thing that makes a car go quicker but a huge amount of small details and all the philosophy that has developed in a team over years."
MA: "if you get a lot of technical data of another car it is not a matter of single details that you would like or not of the other car, trying to imitate what the other team did, but it is a matter of knowing references… If I know the weight distribution of another car, the efficiency, how powerful is the engine and so on, then I know my references and know exactly where to put our resources.
So I have a higher possibility of arriving at the same result if I am behind or even a better result if I am quicker and with less energy spent, less money and in a quicker time, so for sure it is an advantage to just know things and how the other works because it is a sort of technical gift in this respect."
this is really becoming ridiculous..and now no one is going to rmbr this season for the nice good ol 4 way battle this is. I'm sori its clear i'm a Mclaren fan. But the way Ferrari is acting about this whole thing is ruthlessly idiotic. they just trying to find every onunce of existent or none existent evidence against Mclaren. And for god sakes, if the point that Mclaren used Ferrari information to improve thier machinary..how on earth is that possible..both cars have complete opposite spectrum design philosophies..and you can see this clearly by photos and how each car reacts so differently to different circuits. How Ferrari is faster in certian types and Mclaren are faster on certian types..i just feel that Ferrari is losing thier minds and trying not to fall under cause they don't have the political stabillity..Does a man who is guilty look and talk like Ron Dennis looks in this present time?..he looks like a man who seeing his good work muddied by a red faced team....but we will see what unfolds..we really will..and hope it will be the end of it one way or the other so that we can rmbr this season for the good reasons..but for Ferrari..even if they do win the case..they will win a tarnished tittle with the billing "Ferrari won it from Mclaren, from a case" not "Ferrari won it, on the track".
Now Ferrari are pulling out the stops to throw as much mud as possible in the hope some will stick or discredit McLaren where it hurts - in the eyes of potential sponsors.
People, in general, consider public news of people ordered to front up to give evidence in court as already being guilty. Studies have been done where people ordered to appear in court to give evidence against someone else are often associated with the crime negatively.
If Ferrari play like this, one day Stepney (or someone else) will front up publicly with a smoking gun story which will blow Ferrari's notion of their own team spirit/company-employee relationship out of the water.
Jean Todt wrote:I mean, it's a taint on the sport every time that there is a bad controversy. It can happen in athletics, it can happen with gold medal winners, it can happen with cycling, it can happen with football, and now it is something that is happening in Formula One.
"I think that we are sorry that it is happening in Formula One, but we are in the position where we want the truth to appear. And that's all that we want, and all that we have been working on and doing. And we are confident that the truth will come through.
There are so many hypocritical posts here that it makes me laughs.
When you boil it down this post is all about one thing which cannot be disputed, one team - McLaren being in possession of technical plans/ data etc from another team – Ferrari.
This point alone needs questions answered & the way I see it is that Ferrari wants answers plain and simple.
Just because it is his royal hinaus, beyond reproach, all honourable, my sh*t does not stink Ron Dennis involved we should just look away and forget everything. Don’t think so.
Can you imagine for one minute if the rolls were reversed, people would be screaming blue murder that the cheating Italians are at it again? No court case needed just GUILTY.
McLaren have Ferrari documents & Ferrari are winging cheating Bas*ards – very logical assumption.
Formula one as everyone knows is the pinnacles of technology and is measured in millimetres & milliseconds. This being the case any information one team has of other teams can be used in some way no matter what it is.
We are not talking about what type of toilet paper Ferrari use here my friends. From what I read the data they have is quite comprehensive.
So Ferrari has every right to want answers plain and simple. If it ends up being a bit of a witch hunt I think they have more right to pursue it than McLaren have to want is swept under the carpet.
If you don’t agree I am sorry but you will get over it.
From a Formula one fan.
Spooky.
