McLaren could have been banned for two years following the 2007 Spygate
Five years after the McLaren team was disqualified from the 2007 Constructors' World Championship and penalized with a record fine of one hundred million dollars, Ron Dennis reveals that the British team could have faced a much heavier sanction from the FIA by considering an appeal in civil court.
If the 2007 season will remain in the eyes of some as the crowning of Kimi Räikkönen, the explosive debut of Lewis Hamilton, and his now legendary rivalry with Fernando Alonso, for others it bears the mark of scandal, the espionage affair known as “Spygate” having tainted Formula 1 and more specifically the McLaren team. Found guilty by the FIA of possessing confidential information about Ferrari, the Woking-based team was disqualified from the world constructors’ championship and was fined a record one hundred million dollars, on which it managed to obtain a tax reduction.
However, in the magazine *MotorSport*, Ron Dennis, currently Executive Chairman of McLaren Automotive and team director of McLaren until March 2009, reveals that his team could have been punished much more severely by the FIA, thus confirming the rumors at the time of a possible two-year exclusion: « When I was told the amount of the penalty that had been imposed on McLaren, based on what any court of justice would have judged as circumstantial evidence [which does not prove the accused’s guilt, ed.], I thought my only option was to go to the civil court. But then two members of the World Council told me, in private, that if I did that, the sanction could become a two-year exclusion. So I had to consider the loss of all the team’s income for two years, a much larger sum, and I made the most pragmatic decision. »
However, for many paddock observers, the sanction imposed on McLaren was primarily political, as a few months later, the Renault team would be found guilty of possessing confidential McLaren documents without being penalized since it could not be demonstrated that the French team had benefited from it. In reality, by targeting McLaren, Max Mosley, then-president of the FIA, supposedly aimed to harm Ron Dennis, who subsequently decided to step back from McLaren’s F1 activities to focus on managing McLaren Automotive. Thus, in his book *The Secret Life of Bernie Ecclestone*, Tom Bower attributed the following quote to Max Mosley: « Five million dollars to punish the wrongdoing and ninety-five million dollars because Ron [Dennis] is a fool. »
