Stepney says not to blame for spy scandal

Stepney and Coughlan were at the centre of the spy controversy last year that resulted in McLaren being given a $100 million (USD) fine and excluded from the constructors' championship.

Although Stepney admits that he did hand over information, he makes it clear in an interview with Sky Sport's World Motor Sport show, to be broadcast this evening, that he never expected the affair to turn out the way he did.

"I don't feel responsible in any way for what happened at McLaren," said Stepney. "My original [plan], or my ideas, were to make contact with somebody, but not to benefit [myself]; it was to talk about and see what I could do somewhere else with a group of people.

"Obviously it got a bit sensitive and somebody used information more than I actually thought it [would be] - or not more than it should have been, it should never have been used...to that extreme."

Stepney and Coughlan held joint talks with Honda early last year as part of a sounding-out exercise to try and move to the Japanese manufacturer.

"It is very difficult to walk into one team with a thousand people and make an impression," he said. "I've never [in my career] walked straight in to a winning team, but the results have been achieved not just by me, but by a group of people, good results, whether it was Lotus, Benetton or Ferrari.

"I think, at the end of this year or at the end of 2007, I was looking to get out of Ferrari anyway; whether it was going to be in Formula One I wasn't quite sure. I think Formula One was going away from a direction I really wanted to go."

Stepney, who is due to write a book about his life in Formula One, has said he expects his future career path to take him back to the grass roots of motorsport.

"I've got a lot of other more interesting opportunities going back into the grass roots of motor racing," he said.

"Don't get me wrong, Formula One I've worked in for many years. I've enjoyed it, I've made a living out of it, it's been a very good experience in life, but I think I prefer to go into a sort of a grass roots racing again."