|  Ferrari has accepted the FIA’s proposal to draw a line under the McLaren spying affair “from a sporting point of view”, but made it clear that it intends to press ahead with its ongoing legal action in England and Italy.
McLaren published a humiliating apology to the governing body, Ferrari and the wider F1 community on Thursday, in which it acknowledged that leaked Ferrari technical secrets had seeped further into the team than its own investigations had indicated.
Along with the apology, which was prompted by a detailed report by the FIA’s technical department, McLaren offered to cease development work on three aspects of its 2008 car that the report identified as bearing similarities to Ferrari designs.
FIA president Max Mosley reacted to McLaren’s initiative by asking the World Motor Sport Council to treat the matter as closed and cancel its plans for a 14 February meeting to consider the eligibility of McLaren’s 2008 car.
Ferrari said in a statement that it had no objection to Mosley’s recommendation, but would continue to pursue its criminal and civil cases against its former head of performance development Nigel Stepney and ex-McLaren chief designer Mike Coughlan.
“Ferrari notes the apology offered today by the McLaren Group, following the investigations carried out by the FIA technical department, as presented to the WSMC on 7th December last,†the statement said.
“The written and verbal statements issued by senior McLaren personnel both at the World Council meetings of the 26th July and 13th September and through the media have thus been publicly proved wrong.
“Therefore it is admitted that confidential information which was the property of Ferrari was disseminated within the structure of the English team and this also confirms the seriousness of the behaviour of those involved over the past few months.
“In the light of McLaren’s apology and the guarantees it has presented, Ferrari respects the proposal of the FIA president to cancel the extraordinary general meeting of the WSMC scheduled for 14th February coming, thus bringing this incident to a close from a sporting point of view.
“However, it is confirmed that criminal actions underway in Italy and civil ones in England are still continuing.†|
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