Paddy Lowe is not going to move from McLaren to Mercedes F1 this year. Any substance behind the rumour will be known only to a few and they are not telling. The fact that a statement has been made over Paddy's future does at least indicate that there had been discussion.

It is a blow to Niki Lauda's plans for Mercedes. When Bobby Rahal thought he had won Adrian Newey to Jaguar F1 and Newey changed his mind, Lauda manipulated that to get Rahal ousted from Jaguar. I doubt if Lauda has considered falling on his sword now that a similar thing has happened to him.

If Lowe had joined Mercedes what would have happened to Ross Brawn? Putting two bulls in the same field is a recipe for disaster. The ego of a top designer can be on a par to that of a top driver. They are courted and often paid more than the CEO of a substantial company.

McLaren is different to some other teams in that the Technical Director is never given public prominence and perhaps Paddy was tempted by the possibility that a move would raise his profile. Today's TV coverage means that some designers are now familiar faces and, if you are on telly, you automatically become a celebrity as though you were a singer in a boy band, or someone equally as useful.

The first time I heard the expression, 'gardening leave' was when Adrian Newey prepared to leave Williams for McLaren in 1996. He saw out his contract with Williams but was not allowed in the factory and therefore was denied access to the final tweaks to a design he had instigated and the latest information from wind tunnel testing and computer simulations.

His involvement with his garden mean that he could not influence the design of the 1997 car so he spent the year teasing improvements from Neil Oatley's MP4/12 and concentrating on the 1998 McLaren. .

Intellectual property can be worth millions to a team. When a top designer changed teams, it used to be joked that he took copies of blueprints with him. In fact, most times what he took was what was in his head. Cars were once simple and design teams were small. John Barnard designed the ground-breaking 1981 McLaren MP4 mostly by himself, though he was joined halfway through by Alan Jenkins. They had pencils, slide rules and pocket calculators.

In 1978, there was a scandal in F1. Key members of the Shadow team set up Arrows. The Shadow DN9 and Arrows FA1 were remarkably similar, but it could be argued that since Tony Southgate and Dave Waas had designed both, within months of each other, this was only to be expected.

Arrows made a big thing about the car being build from scratch in 53 days. Don Nichol, boss of Shadow, sued and the clincher was that a Shadow clutch pedal was found in the Arrows workshop. Arrows knew that it was likely to lose in the high court and the day after the judge ruled in Don Nichol's favour, it announced a new car, the A1, which had been designed and built in 52 days.

It was not a top car, but Riccardo Patrese brought one home fourth in the final round, in Canada. Fifty two days from first pencil mark to complete car, some teams will already have started work on next year's car.