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Originally Posted by VIVA GT
Or maybe the driver of the one Racing Point car in the face was instructed to ease off a little until the appeal result was made public?
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i'm not sure i find copying to be worse then just being able to buy a spec part.
the line has been moving towards allowing more and more spec parts to be sold to customers so the line is fluid. i would imagine the top teams go to great lengths to hide their 'secrets' as well as buy up the talent from smaller teams if they happen to have worthy secrets themselves. i suppose top people from top team also go to smaller teams also so they bring the knowledge to copy with them.
i guess what may be more shocking is not the copying itself per say but just how they managed to copy to this detail this quickly or without the transfer of staff and/or circumventing gardening leave which is primarily aimed at extending the amount of time ideas and technology can filter through the teams.
that said though, Force India/RP had already been moving towards buying more Merc parts and no doubt they were legally receiving technical assistance...with F1 being a relatively small fishbowl is it outside the realm of possibilities that RP went down a similar design process or take design cues just based on what the TV feed or photo journalist caught on camera?
however, if someone had directly passed on detailed technical specs then that would be cheating of the criminal variety? short of a photocopy store clerk calling Ferrari or a whistle blower, or finding the data on a RP server... im not sure how anyone could prove that though.
Renault of course were also rumoured to have had access to that same book that got Mclaren in so much trouble (so much irony in f1).
when Toyota showed up with a Ferrari clone (based on a 2002 Ferrari?) there were certainly allegations that they had managed to get Ferrari's data (from their Cologne wind tunnel perhaps?)...there may have even been a police investigation. i dont believe anything happened with that but that may have been more to do with the fact that Toyota had so desperately under performed (which RP is sort of doing now
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anyways long rambling story short...copying, while being similar to stealing, is not exactly stealing unless it is criminally overt and that is where the line is?