The Formula One spy scandal came back to haunt McLaren Mercedes yesterday as it emerged that four senior executives have been summoned to appear before an Italian magistrate investigating the team’s unauthorised possession of Ferrari technical secrets.
The executives are Ron Dennis, the team principal, Martin Whitmarsh, the chief executive, Mike Coughlan, the chief designer, and Paddy Lowe, the team’s engineering director. It is thought that Jonathan Neale, the managing director, and Rob Taylor, the design team leader, will be summoned at a later date by Giuseppe Tibis.
Tibis, who last year questioned Fern-ando Alonso, the former McLaren driver who has now joined Renault, and Pedro De La Rosa, the test driver, is also expected to seek evidence from Nigel Stepney, the former Ferrari mechanic who gave Coughlan a 780-page dossier of Ferrari data. It was Ferrari’s chance discovery of what Stepney had done that sparked the scandal that resulted in McLaren being fined a record £50 million and thrown out of the 2007 constructors’ championship.
McLaren would not comment last night but they are known to have received notification of the summons, which requires the four men to attend hearings after February 18.
The criminal proceedings in Italy are likely to drag on for months and will do so despite the decision of the FIA, the governing body of motor sport, to close its own investigation into the affair in mid-December. This came after Whitmarsh published a grovelling apology to the FIA that had found more evidence of conduct that amounted to cheating and was threatening to impose further sanctions on the Woking-based team.