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The British chief mechanic accused of boycotting and violating industrial secrecy, however, was circumstantial in offering his version to British newspapers.
"I deny in the strongest terms that I have ever photocopied or sold Ferrari documents, I am the victim of an internal company war. There are four or five other people who may have passed on that material".
Stepney then reconstructed the recent history of his relationship at Maranello:
"I realised I was going to have problems when Ross Brawn took a sabbatical at the end of last season. I wanted to talk to Aldo Costa, the chief designer. Certainly not with Mario Almondo, the new technical director. No luck. In mid-February relations deteriorated, every word I said was reported back to the bosses: I couldn't work. I missed the direct relationship with Ross, he knew what I was capable of doing very well and supported me 100%. Now I had to report to four or five people, it was very frustrating. I let Jean Todt know that I didn't want to travel any more, I wanted to stop and think about the future. Ferrari took it badly. I felt like a traitor just because I didn't want to travel. At that point, I wasn't looking around. Whenever I talked about work topics at the factory, words were brought back to the top. People were afraid to talk to me".
He adds:
"It was at that point, we were in April, that I made contact with Mike Coughlan. I had known him for a long time, we had worked on different teams, he is good, but we are not friends. I had had a meeting with Fry but I didn't want to go alone to a second meeting. Mike was not thinking of leaving McLaren even though he was not happy there. When three or four people at Ferrari read in the papers about my contact with Honda, they were interested in being part of a technical group in another team. They wanted to follow us to a facility where they would feel more comfortable. We (Stepney and Coughlan) met the Honda bosses together in London, at Heathrow Airport in June. But we didn't go through anything at all; we were just looking for a new job".
Then:
"On May 17, Ferrari took legal action against me. At that point I called Jean Todt and told him I was going on vacation to the Philippines. I filled out a form but left it on my table. I told him I would not return until everything was cleared up, then we never spoke again. I was accused by Mario Almondo of taking some drawings. They were legitimately in my possession because I needed them to work on the simulator. To him, however, the project office said that I had them. I took the papers and threw them on Almondo's table. The next day I had them again. I knew I was under constant surveillance and I knew that some people could access my computer".
Finally:
"I knew I was under constant surveillance and I knew that some people could access my computer: I didn't copy anything. For the last few months they have been tailing me, scaring my wife and daughter. There have been high-speed chases, and when we stopped a car on Thursday, the people inside refused to answer us. Ferrari is afraid that I have precious things in my mind - there was a lot of controversy at that time. Do you think Nicolas Tombazis, chief designer, came to Maranello with an empty head? Ferrari's new front end and new aerodynamics came from McLaren because he had them in his head. The problem is that Ferrari in Italy is something unique: it's a religion, it's like going against the Vatican. And yes, now I'm afraid".
Jean Todt smiles and says:
"There would be so many things to say, but right now we are not authorized. There is an investigation in Italy and one in Britain. The truth will come out, slowly, and everything will be understood".
Instead, Luca Montezemolo, chairman of Ferrari and Confindustria, is more explicit:
"This story is one of the ugliest things that has ever happened in motor racing. The truth will come out and it will be an ugly truth. Whoever acts against Ferrari is doing an ugly thing, on a professional, human and sporting level. I am sorry that these documents are coming from a person who has worked so many years with us. Ecclestone? He is wrong to say that this scandal will be forgotten, we want to get to the bottom of it".
Nigel Stepney was being followed. There was a car with people in it, stopped in front of his house, day and night; and a man always behind him, tailing him, glued to him wherever he went. Who was he? Who was he working for? What was he looking for? It’s a mystery. All that is certain is that the technician at the center of the Ferrari connection is once again unreachable. And this time not because of planned vacations. This time for a more disturbing reason:
"I am worried, I don't know who is following me or why. But my wife is afraid and I want to get away for a while".
He then reached a location that his lawyers, Sonia Bartolini and Barbara Pini, prefer not to disclose:
"For a few days Stepney will not be reachable. He will be back around July 16".
Already quite mysterious, and enriched by this latest chapter, this story becomes more and more intricate. The feeling is that there is something, some element that no one, neither Ferrari nor Stepney, wants to tell. Thus we come to Stepney's second disappearance, which only adds doubt to doubt and mystery to mystery. The most obvious one is connected to the investigative choice made by the Modena prosecutor, Fabio Tibis, who has not yet opened any file for espionage (despite the British investigation) but only that for sabotage. This decision should not be taken for granted, and seems to reveal some diffidence regarding the real dynamics of the facts, at least relating to the second part of the story. And if the suspicion is that there is at least one aspect that is not yet clear, the men who followed Stepney this month may be the key to understanding what it is. The media are talking about retaliation following a failed promotion to the role of Technical Director, but neither Nigel Stepney nor Jean Todt propose that idea. And indeed, the French manager says about the British technician:
"He has great technical skills, great organizational skills, but he has a difficult character. He is not an easy person but he is a good professional. He had a contract until the end of 2007, I wanted to give him the opportunity to show that with a new organization he could be useful even if he was not happy with the new occupation. After he insisted many times I said okay, you won't come with us to the races anymore because we couldn't change our organization every week. In that sense I defended him, it is true. But I did not expect this person to lose his mind".
Flipping through the books, a few court documents, and you discover that design theft and violations of secrets in Formula 1 are old news, daily affairs.
The latest case - before the Stepney scandal, which tops them all and sums them up - is last spring’s conviction of two Ferrari men: Angelo Santini, 9 months in first instance for violating trade secrets, and engineer Mauro Iacconi, 16 months for receiving stolen goods. In 2003 they passed some information regarding the Maranello-built car to Toyota, where they had gone to work: the two cars, in fact, looked embarrassingly similar that year. During the two Italian technicians’ trial came the discovery that, in the same year, a top Ferrari designer had quit his job and taken to a Luxembourg-based company an actual piece of the Italian car: a diffuser. Ferrari tried to stop the designer, but the impenetrability of Luxembourg codes meant that the removed part was never seen again in Maranello. The unknown company would then offer it to another F1 team. In motor racing, this type of espionage is called chicanery. The first documented case was during the promotional tour set up by Peugeot around England, it was 1913. The race car had been entrusted to a driver called Dario Resta, a personal friend of the boss of their rival team, Sunbeam. The boss invited the driver to lunch at his home in Wolverhampton, and the car, unattended, was quickly seized by Sunbeam staff. It was then measured, checked and put back in its place. The following year the Sunbeam that took to the track was a copy of the Peugeot, but both were beaten by the new Mercedes. At the end of the 1970s, the Arrows was built in 53 days as the Shadow’s clone: it began to get results, but the London High Court banned it from the circuits. In 1979 it was the great Mario Andretti who urged his manager at Lotus to find information on the elusive Williams: Alan Jones was consistently three seconds ahead in practice. Thus, old Colin Chapman forced an employee to become a spy:
"You have to measure the Williams’ nose, otherwise don't show up at the office on Monday".
The employee tried, was spotted, and risked getting a beating. And before dying, Harvey Postlethwaite, technical director of Gilles Villeneuve and Jody Scheckter's Ferrari, confessed that in the summer of 1980 his engineers had spent an entire night, in Hockenheim, inside the hated Williams’ garage. They had to check and note down the secrets of the FW07, which was then triumphant.