Over the years, we have seen many fines given to athletes for various reasons. These usually range from minor offences or can range up to bigger fines. However none of these fines have been bigger than the one handed down by the FIA (Governing body of motorsport) in 2007 following what has now been dubbed as “spy gate”.
Nigel Stepney was the chief mechanic for Ferrari through all their glory years most notably being apart of their 5 championships in a row from 2000-2004. Despite being British and Ferrari typically employing Italians, Nigel enjoyed major success and made a name for himself in the world of Formula 1. However, on June 27 2007, Stepney was the subject of a criminal enquiry after Ferrari had made a formal complaint, stating that they believed he was sabotaging Ferrari. Ferrari had reason to believe this as Stepney was unhappy with the teams recent restructuring. Only a few days later police would search Stepney’s house and find 780 printed pages of technical information on Ferrari’s 2007 car, but the story of how he got caught is not what most would expect.
In the county of Surrey in England, a woman would walk into a print shop and ask for some documents to be scanned onto CD’s. The employee at the shop would notice that the documents that were asked to be scanned were in fact technical information about Ferrari’s car for that year, he would then search up the woman’s name, “Trudy Coughlan”, wife of Michael Coughlan who happened to be chief of design down at Mclaren Formula 1 team. The employee would later tip off Ferrari, and they would have their mole.
Interestingly enough, there was never any evidence to suggest that the technical documents ever left Michael Coughlan’s house for that matter. This was until the 2007 Hungarian Grand Prix. For a bit of context, during this weekend, Fernando Alonso (Mclaren driver at the time) would block his teammate Lewis Hamilton and prevent him from starting another qualifying lap. Afterwards, Alonso talked to Mclaren principle Ron Dennis and threatened to release information that would’ve destroyed McLaren if his specific requests weren’t met. What were the requests you ask? Alonso requested that Mclaren would make Hamilton’s car run out of fuel during the race. This scandal would all come to a conclusion when the FIA later gained evidence through text messages between Alonso and Pedro De La Rosa (Mclaren test driver) discussing the information provided by Stepney himself. The FIA believed that this had breached article 151c of the international sporting code. As a result, Mclaren would be disqualified from the 2007 championship and was handed down a 100 million pound fine, making this the largest fine in sporting history.
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