Nigel Roebuck: Fifth Column

'A victory for common sense' is one of the more irritating of modern political cliches, up there with 'Let's be clear'.

But I can think of no more accurate phrase to describe the outcome of last Thursday's meeting of the FIA World Motor Sport Council in Paris, at which the members concluded unanimously that there was no clear evidence that McLaren, as a team, had benefited from confidential Ferrari information in the possession of one of its employees, chief designer Mike Coughlan.

That being so, there was no justification for punishment. Unanimous the decision may have been, but it did not keep Luigi Macaluso - an Italian who sits on the World Council by virtue of his presidency of the CIK-FIA International Karting Commission - from afterwards saying he had tried to persuade his fellow members to vote otherwise: "For me, McLaren are guilty, and that's that."

Macaluso's comments were merely the opening sally in a torrent of fury and abuse which swiftly followed from his homeland. By the weekend, one would not have been surprised by a message of support from the Vatican.

Given that the FIA has confirmed the decision was unanimous, it may be less than impressed by Macaluso's comments. And the same, I would imagine, is true of its feelings about some of Jean Todt's remarks, most notably that apparently suggesting a bias against Ferrari.

"I wonder what would have happened with the roles reversed," Todt said. "I wonder if they had found in the house of a Ferrari chief designer 780 classified documents of another team... There would have been cries of a scandal, and an exemplary punishment would have been demanded. And it would have been granted.

"There is not even a sign of logic in this verdict. McLaren were found responsible of having violated the regulations of F1, of having behaved in a fraudulent manner, but they haven't been punished.

"One thing is certain: we at Ferrari can calmly look at ourselves in the mirror. I think others can't do the same."

The self-righteousness of the last paragraph will have reduced many in the paddock to helpless mirth. As for the first, I confess that my immediate reaction was to reflect that Ferrari is rather poorly placed to complain about decisions taken over time in Paris.

One thinks back, for example, to the autumn of 1999, when the Ferraris of Eddie Irvine and Michael Schumacher finished one-two in the Malaysian Grand Prix, and were then disqualified after their bargeboards had been found not to conform to the rules. And this confirmed McLaren's Mika Hakkinen as world champion for that year.

The following weekend, at a meeting in Paris, it was decided that the bargeboards were in conformity, after all, and many of us were not a little surprised by that. Irvine and Schumacher were reinstated in the Sepang results, and the world championship, with Suzuka to come, was suddenly alive again, and Irvine could still beat Hakkinen to the title.

This did not happen, but still Ferrari beat McLaren to the constructors' crown, which would have been impossible without the 16 points from Sepang. Let's get something straight from the outset. If Coughlan and Ferrari's Nigel Stepney are guilty of all the accusations laid at their door, both, in my opinion, deserve anything that comes their way. Both were hugely paid by their respective employers, who might reasonably have assumed a high degree of integrity and loyalty in return.

Ferrari has sacked Stepney, and I would think it unlikely that Coughlan will ever again set foot in the McLaren Technology Centre. If these two believed they could operate outside the bounds of accepted behaviour, I haven't a grain of sympathy for either of them.

The supposition has been that their plan was to sell themselves to Honda, which - somewhat belatedly - admitted to meetings with the pair. There's no doubt that, had Coughlan and Stepney been hired, their combined knowledge of the two most successful teams in Formula 1 would have been of enormous value.

This is simply 'the market', and it applies in F1 as in all other walks of life. I well remember, some years ago, a team principal telling me that the first task of his new driver - who may or may not have come from Ferrari - had been to undergo an exhaustive debrief with the engineers, bringing them up to speed on everything he could remember about his previous team. Made their eyes water, he said. You can't expect a man to forget all he has learned from his past - and that's fine, so long as it's only in his head.

Why else are designers who change teams required first to undergo a lengthy period of 'gardening leave'? Why else are drivers, known to be leaving at season's end, increasingly kept from testing forthcoming parts? You can't keep a man from using his memory, sharing his experience, so all you can do is try to ensure that by the time he starts work with a new team, his knowledge of yours will be at least a little out of date. A 780-page dossier of contemporary information is hardly the same thing.

That said, the World Council studied an enormous amount of information, before concluding that there was insufficient evidence that McLaren had gained from it.

In a sense this smacks of the 'not proven' verdict in Scottish law. But a 'not guilty' verdict was probably out of the question, in any absolute sense, given that Ferrari documents were indeed found in the house of a McLaren employee. What the World Council decided was that there was no proof that McLaren the team had benefited from it.

Call me naive, but I would have expected nothing else. If ever I have met a man who could be described as honest to a fault, it is Ron Dennis, and if there is a team whose byword is integrity, it is McLaren. Without a blink, Ron would lose a world championship rather than cheat, which is not something I would necessarily say of all in the paddock.

It angers me that the disreputable behaviour of one employee should jeopardise the reputation of a company.

It would be easier, I must say, to respond more sympathetically to Todt's outburst, had he not behaved in exactly the same way when the FIA stewards dared to put Schumacher to the back of the grid at Monaco last year following Michael's shameful antics at the end of qualifying, when he 'parked' at Rascasse in an attempt to protect his pole position.

"Ferrari notes with great displeasure," Todt's press release bellowed, "the decision of the race stewards. We totally disagree with it, for it creates a very serious precedent, ruling out the possibility of driver error. With no real evidence, they have assumed he is guilty."

Er, could we have that last bit again, Jean?