The 2007 F1 Season, Pt. 2

Picking up where we left off in part one of this 2007 F1 season retrospective, we come to the end of the summer break and the start of the second half of the season.

Although there was on track action in the next two rounds  at Turkey (won by Felipe Massa) and Monza (won by Fernando Alonso), the real story in the sport was what was going on in the court room.

The McLaren Spygate scandal was a gigantic deal that is arguably the single biggest reason why McLaren fell to the very bottom of F1 in the years following 2007. I’m not going to go over the entire story here simply because that could be an entire article in its own right (this video is an excellent breakdown of the whole saga), but here are the essentials of the story:

• Ferrari employee on the outs starts communicating with a McLaren engineer.
• McLaren engineer’s wife drops off 780 pages of confidential Ferrari technical information at a print-and-copy store.
• Store contacts Ferrari, Ferrari begins investigation and confirms this is true.
• McLaren claims that the now fired engineer is the only person who had Ferrari information, nobody else on the team had access to it.
• The FIA rules in McLaren’s favor in July.
• After the Hungary qualifying incident, Alonso allegedly threatens McLaren boss Ron Dennis with the release of emails of his and test driver Pedro de la Rosa communications with the engineer.
• Dennis goes to FIA president Max Mosely and claims that Alonso is falsifying records in an attempt to blackmail the team.
• Alonso’s emails end up in F1 chief Bernie Ecclestone’s inbox somehow, who forwards them to the FIA.
• FIA opens investigation back up and gives all three McLaren drivers personal immunity if they agree to cooperate with the investigation, which they do.

The result of all of this was announced in the week following Monza, right before Spa: a disqualification of the McLaren entry in 2007, which meant the team would not receive credit for any points in the Constructor’s Championship, in addition to a $100 million fine. The fine still stands as the largest in the history of organized sports, and the disqualification ending up costing all prize money due to them in what would have been a Constructor’s Championship season, which would probably be over at least $50 million at the time.

Contrary to Dennis’ statement in the video, the de la Rosa email in section 3.21 of the leaked FIA report that revealed that…