Motor Sport: Coughlan 'told Mclaren Team Colleagues' of Ferrari Data

The controversy over the alleged leak of confidential design information from Ferrari to their rivals McLaren further intensified yesterday when reports from Italy suggested that the British team's chief designer, Mike Coughlan, confided in several of his senior colleagues about secret Ferrari documents in his possession.

McLaren could be expelled from this year's formula one world championship, destroying Lewis Hamilton's title challenge, if they are found guilty of industrial espionage at a meeting of the FIA world motorsport council on July 26.

The Italian daily newspaper La Repubblica has quoted from what it claims to be Coughlan's affidavit which was handed to Ferrari last week as part of the team's legal proceedings in the UK. This action was triggered by a tip-off from a photocopying shop in Surrey after Coughlan's wife Trudy came in to copy about 780 Ferrari drawings which had come into her husband's possession.

Coughlan allegedly reveals that he showed these documents to several people at McLaren - and not just to the managing director, Jonathan Neale, as had previously been alleged in court. According to La Repubblica, Coughlan says that all those McLaren colleagues responded in the same manner by distancing themselves from these documents and advising him to destroy them. Coughlan has reportedly not confirmed that his source for the documents was indeed the former Ferrari engineer Nigel Stepney, and the newspaper only cites Coughlan as saying he received the documents via a courier mail service.

These revelations come 11 days before McLaren representatives have been called to answer a charge that between March and July 2007, in breach of Article 151c of the International Sporting Code, they "had unauthorized possession of documents and confidential information belonging to Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro, including information that could be used to design, engineer, build, check, test, develop and/or run a 2007 Ferrari F1 car".

Coughlan, who remains suspended from his job, still has to explain how he came into the possession of the Ferrari data and what he did with it once he had obtained it. Coughlan's affidavit was provided to Ferrari under condition that they would not hand it over to the Italian authorities, who are running a criminal investigation on related matters, including an action against the former race and test team manager Stepney who was sacked from Ferrari two weeks ago.

Only Ferrari and the FIA are understood to have had access to the affidavit, which is not even available in the London high court records. According to La Repubblica, Coughlan confirms in his affidavit that he had Ferrari's technical drawings and internal documentation in his possession. Ferrari lawyer Massimiliano Maestretti told RAI television that there is still some uncertainty regarding who knew about the documents and just when some of them were delivered to Coughlan.

"The McLaren statement mentioned the documents were received at the end of April but we have proof that there were more later than that with a May date," he was quoted as saying. McLaren issued a statement last Thursday saying that the technical dossier at the centre of the controversy was solely the responsibility of Coughlan.

"The documents and confidential information were only in the possession of one currently suspended employee on an unauthorized basis and no element of it has been used in relation to McLaren's formula one cars," said the communiqué.