Angelo Santini, who worked for Ferrari from 1995 until February, 2002, has been named as the engineer at the centre of allegations of industrial espionage prompted by Ferrari against Toyota. Santini is reported to have told an Italian newspaper that, sure, the 2003 Toyota looks remarkably like a 2002 Ferrari, but there are many differences, among them the engine.

In Santini's favour is the fact that the engine plays an enormous role in a car's package, other than supplying power. The 2003 Renault, for example, had a 111-degree V10 in order to lower the centre of gravity. That made an enormous difference to Renault's package, but what the Renault R203 lost in grunt it made up in other ways.

In the 1970s, there were times when Ferrari had the upper hand over the teams which used the Cosworth DFV. Ferrari had a flat-12 engine and benefited when rules governing the height and size of the rear wing were changed because the DFV was, by comparison, a tall unit. It was also a narrow engine so came back into its own when ground effect arrived.

The fortunes of teams using the Cosworth DFV varied not so much on power output, but how the shape of the engine fitted aerodynamic packages. This would appear to be evidence which Signor Santini might consider summoning to his defence.

Consider this, however, teams ballast their cars by up to 100 kgs to obtain maximum performance from the chassis. It would seem to me that if Ferrari is to have its suspicions proved about stolen data, then weight distribution must also enter the equation. If I can think of that, then Ross Brawn was there long before me, so it may be that the current case is a tad more complicated than just looking at the shape which, in any case, could be copied from photographs.

You do not need industrial espionage to get the shape of a 2002 Ferrari, you can get it exactly if you have plenty of images plus one known dimension, such as the exact size of a wheel. The tricky part comes with that which is hidden, which means the exact weight distribution.

So far, everyone who has reported the arrest of Angelo Santini has been careful to distance Toyota from him, but who built the Toyota TF103? Are we really to believe that nobody in Cologne noticed that their car bore more than a passing resemblance to the Ferrari F2002?

Who signed the order which allowed the moulds to be cut? We speak here of multo clams. A copy of a Ferrari F2002 does not come into the world as a result of spontaneous combustion.

Someone signed the order which caused the car to be made and I bet that it was not Angelo Santini.

I don't know why, but an unworthy thought has entered my head. I believe it is true to say that only one manufacturer's works team has been disqualified from the World Rally Championship for an entire season for cheating. If memory serves me right, the team which was preparing the cars for this manufacturer discovered an ingenious method of by-passing the air restrictor on the turbocharger.

Others will know better than I exactly what was done, but there is no disputing the name of the manufacturer; it was Toyota.

Toyota was excluded from the World Rally Championship because its works-sanctioned team was caught cheating. The guys in the front-line took the shots, can anyone help with how far up the ladder the cheating went?

What is the position of Ferrari, if Toyota actually copied its 2002 car for 2003? In 1988, Adrian Newey and Nick Wirth designed the March 881, with a narrow cockpit and high nose, come 1989 and half the cars on the grid looked like the March. Copying is endemic in motor racing, in fact, you can tell how good a design is by how widely it is copied.

(For historical background, Enzo Ferrari was once an industrial spy for Alfa Romeo, he admitted as much. When Ferrari considered making a mid-engined F1 car, it bought a couple of Cooper T51s, fitted them with Ferrari Tipo 555 'Super Squalo' engines and created a fictitious private team, Scuderia Eugenio Castellotti, to gain experience of running mid-engined cars.)