FIA hearing in Monaco
Renault says suspended engineer Phil Mackereth is a straightforward, trusting individual who acted stupidly when he brought material belonging to McLaren with him to the French manufacturer in 2006.
That is part of the testimony revealed by transcripts of the Renault/McLaren hearing earlier this month recently released by FIA.
Mackereth also revealed that he brought the 11 disks of information with him for professional and personal reasons and not with any intention of showing them to anyone else.
Renault technical director Bob Bell, who was questioned before the WMSC, called Mackereth a "very genuine and straightforward individual".
"He is someone I would trust. He is someone with a high degree of respect within his peer groups. That is true within McLaren as much as it is in Renault. His actions in this situation were stupidity, naivete and a degree of recklessness – and little more than that. There is no malevolence, there is no intention to deliberately do wrong or to cheat. That is not in his make-up."
Asked by McLaren lawyer Ian Mill why he only interviewed 20 senior engineers as part of the internal investigation, Bell said it would not have made good business sense to talk to the 500 or so employees currently working for the team in England.
"I was absolutely satisfied that, after initially speaking to 18 engineers and subsequently two more junior engineers, that no information had been disseminated into our organization beneath that level."
Bell also admitted that the team did not seek to draw information out of Mackereth about the things he did while employed at McLaren.
"It is not unusual and reasonably well-accepted within Formula 1 that, when an engineer comes to a new team from another, it is reasonably fair game to discuss how things may or may not have been done differently," he testified. "I would like to stress, several teams go to great lengths to de-brief newly arriving engineers about the level of their knowledge about what happens in other organizations. Renault does not do this and is proud of it."
As for Mackereth, he testified that in the first few days and possibly weeks after joining Renault, the drawings he brought with him from McLaren were actually sitting in a scrap paper pile at home for his children to use as drawing paper. It wasn’t until a discussion about dampers arose that he retrieved the drawings and brought them to Renault.
When questioned as to his reasons for creating the 11 disks and the purpose of taking them to Renault, he said he did so primarily to maintain a record of the work he had done at McLaren.
"When I collected the documents, there were several reasons. I wanted to pull together a record of my experience at McLaren. There was also some professional interest and insecurity. I had no intention of disclosing the documents to anybody or making something of them. It was a personal record for me."
Mackereth did admit that he only approached Renault management about the McLaren material only after he was informed by a friend that a former Renault employee had tipped off McLaren to the possibility that someone had taken some material with him to his new employer.
Renault Deputy Technical Director James Allison admitted he was "foolish" not to have informed senior management that he had indeed seen confidential McLaren information while Mackereth had brought with him.
"I was focused on trying to ensure that something I thought was illegal (the McLaren J-damper system) not continue," said Allison. "That was what I sought to achieve. The events of the last six months have made it abundantly clear to any engineer in Formula 1 that this was a mistake in judgement."
In his closing remarks, Mill pointed out that the FIA investigation at Renault amounted to one day and a 30 minute conversation with the chief designer. By contrast, he said the McLaren investigation took place over a number of weeks and at enormous expense.
FIA president Max Mosley responded to Mill’s assertion by pointing out that no penalty was handed out to McLaren following the initial hearing "because the World Council was not told the truth". He then went on to outline, before the Council, the extent of Renault’s cooperation in the case.
"By contrast, it can be said for Renault that, from the outset, as soon as there was any question, we were sent copies of everything. From McLaren, we initially received blank denial. Though we were told there was an investigation, McLaren sent us no notes of investigations or notes of meetings, nothing of the kind we received from Renault. Arguably, it is a bit unfair to say that we have treated McLaren in a slightly more aggressive manner."
In his summation, Renault lawyer David Philips reminded the Council that when comparing the two cases, the material McLaren had access to from Ferrari was of "significant commerical value". He added that Renault did not use the material for the purposes of sporting advantage and that the team had been "painfully frank" with the FIA and WMSC.
Source: Renault: Engineer Mackereth acted stupidly
