BACK in September, after McLaren were fined $100m and had their constructors’ points cancelled, I wrote that although the team had a case to answer, the penalty seemed unreasonable, although clearly there had been communication between their then chief designer Mike Coughlan and Ferrari’s disaffected employee Nigel Stepney. I stand by that, but documents released in the past 72 hours conclude that Ferrari information filtered further into McLaren than the team at first recognised or chose to admit.
McLaren chief executive Martin Whitmarsh wrote to Max Mosley and the FIA World Motor Sport Council on December 5 in anticipation of their December 7 hearing to admit Ferrari information was more widely spread within McLaren than was previously communicated. He regretted McLaren hadn’t flagged up the