There have been many renowned public instances of copycat cars in F1 and most other racing categories. It’s happened through the years all through the sport as small car builder after builder made copies of the previous year’s dominant car.
In Formula Ford more than thirty years ago everyone used to chuckle over the well-known fact that the American-built Caldwell D9 was a rip-off copy of the UK’s Merlyn mk 11A while Canada’s Magnum was a copy of the Caldwell! And for many years in all forms of racing photographers have been commissioned by teams to shoot on track views of their rivals’ cars in action compared to their own.
“This stuff occurs all the time,” commented one of my friends. “It’s just that this time someone was dumb enough to get caught."
As
Bernie Ecclestone said, ‘If this was a matter between Spyker and Super-Aguri it wouldn’t get one second of media coverage.’.”
Another of my friends was disgusted with the FIA’s holier-than-thou attitude to the Stepneygate saga.
“For the love of god, tell
F1, Max and Bernie to get over themselves!” he implored. “Getting or stealing information from other teams was part of racing back in the good old days. Getting mechanics drunk and getting info out of them was par for the course.”
He then launched into a story about a Bobby Unser-inspired photographing of a rival team’s car designed to poke fun at - to destabilise, as Ron Dennis would say - their rivals’ theories.
“We cut the padlocks off a competitor’s truck one night, went inside with a camera and took photos of their new car,” my friend related.
To read the rest of this Gordon Kirby column and other 'The Way It Is' columns go to www.gordonkirby.com
![FIA Chamber [Pic credit: FIA copyright]](http://pix.crash.net/thumbs/375638.jpg)
