Mark Hughes: F1's Inside Line

So, no Prodrive McLarens next year. The legal challenge to the idea of customer cars has ensured they would have embarked upon their season on less than solid ground. You might even say ground that is downright marshy, given the ongoing arbitration between the concerned constructors (Williams and the Jordan/Midland/Spyker/ Force team) on the one hand and the customer teams (Toro Rosso and Super Aguri) on the other. This is all unfolding in parallel to the ongoing espionage case between McLaren and Renault, itself an indirect result of the earlier Ferrari/McLaren case. What a mess!

Both the customer car and espionage problems have occurred through an attempt at challenging fundamental core principles of modern Formula 1. One of which is that all teams design and construct their own cars, another that information is bound to leak from team to team in so incestuous an environment.

The two principles interlink. The only way teams can compete with each other using their own designs, rather than simply buying the fastest car, is that there aren't really any inaccessible secrets. There is always a way of discovering how team x has found performance and then applying that principle to what you are doing. The leakage of information and the copying of technology is the oil that keeps the whole thing from seizing up. A strict interpretation of intellectual property rights, as understood in the wider world, would bring F1 to a halt.

Consider: the invention of downforce-producing wings. They were first applied to an Opel speed record car in the 1920s. The technology was taken up by Swiss racer/engineer Michael May in the '50s and thereafter by GM, whose programme gave us the be-winged Chaparral sports racers of the mid-60s.

In 1968 the technology found its way into F1 via Ferrari and Brabham. Because the sport has always been about going faster regardless of where the ideas have come from, it has never got itself tied up in knots about who thought of what. If it had, wings would be the intellectual property rights of GM surely - through its purchase of Opel in 1931 - and no one else would be allowed to use the technology.

GM has never been involved in F1. So suppose Ferrari had purchased from them the exclusive intellectual property rights to their technology, for use in F1 only. F1 would surely have died as the rest of the field tried to compete with the only team legally allowed to use this particular performance-transforming technology. So it would have been with, say, ground effect or active ride in later decades. A strict enforcement of the intellectual property rights of those principles would have killed F1 stone dead.

As the rules became more restrictive, so such huge leaps were no longer feasible. Aerodynamic subtleties acquired hugely more significance - and as such very intricate aerodynamic knowledge became the absolute key to success. Cars that looked ostensibly very similar - it was no longer like comparing a ground effect Lotus 79 to the old technology of a Ferrari T3 - had vastly different performance. And the reasons were not obvious - from the outside.

Apply intellectual property rights strictly to that situation and one team would have ended up in an unbeatable position and F1 again would have died. The dispersal of knowledge, either from deriving understanding from observation of another car, or by employing people from other teams with the necessary knowledge, is what enables teams to keep up with each other. As they are doing this, so they are working on their own innovations that will hopefully leapfrog them ahead. Once this has been achieved, they will understand it as inevitable that other teams will then be trying to squeeze that knowledge out of them.

Now, no way is this excusing a Ferrari employee giving away a 780-page document to a rival team. That was a gross abuse of the principle that information floats around between teams. But the official reaction to that case has led to a possible unstitching of the sport's fabric. The crime has been extended to cover much more than just his misdeeds, and has led to what looks like an attempt at applying wider-world IP law wholesale to the tiny world of F1. As such, McLaren's huge fine sets a dangerous precedent. Because, as has already been suggested by the Renault case, there are other examples lurking everywhere - just as there have always been since the very dawn of the sport.

Switching to customer cars could be a way around this. But taken to its logical conclusion, with strict interpretation of IP law, that would eventually leave F1 with a single chassis supplier. No one seriously wants that. It surely has to be a given that F1 teams must design and construct their own cars. But for that principle to continue to work, it needs to be accepted that a degree of information transfer will inevitably occur - indeed has to occur - and we should not get too prissy and moralistic about that.