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I could easily learn to hate Ferrari
Posted by Mark 9 September 2007
Over many years of watching Formula One racing, one pattern emerges. Ferrari have an almost charmed life when it comes to rules and regulations, and particularly the breaching of them. Other teams get hammered for offences you imagine are as bad as Ferrari commits, yet Ferrari always get away it.
The extreme of lunacy was the tyres fiasco at the USA Grand prix when Ferrari and their customer team were alone in running a race the remaining teams were compelled to pull out of. It was against FIA rules for a team to have advance technical information about a track, yet Ferrari and their tyre company knew about the characteristics of the newly-laid diamond-cut surface of Indianapolis. None of the other teams did, and so turned up to discover their tyres were unsuitable. They were the ones punished.
Schumacher has had the most charmed career of any driver while at Ferrari. Racing incidents that just happened to win him races and championships were dismissed as accidents and went unpunished. Millions of fans following their British heroes could only watch and fume.
And now we have the great spy scandal. A Ferrari technician, Nigel Stepney, is supposed to have stolen a technical manual from the team and planned to find a job with another team, using it as a bargaining chip. He planned to do this in concert with a technician from MacLaren, Mike Coughlan. But McLaren was not the other team they planned to go to, however McLaren is the team that is likely to get punished. Why not Ferrari? Their guy was just as bad as the McLaren guy and there's no evidence, just Ferrari's innuendo, that McLaren benefited from anything in the technical manual.
An indicator of Ferrari's lobbying power was the first round of FIA hearings when McLaren were found guilty of possession of the manual, but given no punishment. Plainly there was no evidence that McLaren had anything to do with it, so how could they be found guilty? Only to appease Ferrari of course. Now with the second hearing due on Thursday, Ferrari are using every dirty trick in the book to disrupt the McLaren team.
Ferrari have done incalculable damage to the reputation of Formula One racing in my estimation. I have just about got over my disgust with them, but now they are at it again over the spying scandal and the damage they can do to F1 could exceed the public relations disaster that was the American Grand Prix.
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