One New Year Resolution I intend to keep is to refrain from referring to the scandals which have blighted Formula One as 'spying' when they have been plain theft and betrayal.

Nigel Stepney was serving no higher cause when he handed a dossier of stolen Ferrari data to Mike Coughlan in a restaurant in Spain. Angelo Santini and Mauro Iacconi were not following ideology when they downloaded Ferrari data and passed it to Toyota Motorsport.

Before he left McLaren in 2006, Phil Mackereth, downloaded information, none of which was to do with his work. When he joined Renault, he took with him a pile of disks which were downloaded at Renault and seen by at least ten engineers.

In an interview for Britain's The Guardian newspaper (22.12.07) Max Mosley said, "The Renault case bears no relation at all to the McLaren case. But by carefully spinning it, well, actually lying about it - they (McLaren) created the perception that it did."

In fact, the cases of Toyota, McLaren and Renault are similar in that they all involved theft and betrayal. Betrayal of employers and also of friends and colleagues.

You get a job with a top F1 team, you are able to push your talent further and harder than in almost any other job. You are well-rewarded, you are part of a team, you could be vital to winning World Championships and then someone you trust throws the game. You arrive at work not knowing who you can trust.

Leaving aside impending civil and criminal cases, the matter is not over. Ferrari and McLaren were both betrayed by people whom they had every reason to trust. Nigel Stepney was part of the scenery at Maranello, he was not a junior employee looking to make a quick buck. Mike Coughlan was Chief Designer at McLaren and if you cannot trust your Chief Designer, it's hard to know who you can trust.

The FIA's technical audit of the 2008 McLaren has revealed that the design had been polluted by Ferrari data, but the same audit, which included examination of the hard drives and e-mails of engineers, suggested that there was no conspiracy.

In The Guardian interview, Max Mosley said it was extremely improbable that Ron Dennis did not know about illegal activities within McLaren. Max is a barrister, he did not actually say that Ron Dennis had told porkies, but he made it quite clear that he found it difficult to believe him.

Unlike Max, I do not find it difficult to believe that Ron had no idea of what was going on. Pedro de la Rosa and Fernando Alonso knew something about the stolen dossier and, by all accounts, they kept that knowledge from Lewis Hamilton and his engineers. They appear to have kept the knowledge from their own engineers and that is a hard trick to pull off in a team.

If they could keep a lid on their activities from people with whom they were in frequent contact, it is quite possible they kept it from senior management. It is unlikely they were fed anything too technical by Coughlan, but there appears to have been enough to have tried on the team simulator.

As for the 2008 car, let us take a hypothetical example, a braking system. Most teams use the same hardware, but there is time to be gained by altering the loading of the brakes. You brake hard in your road car and the front end dips, that will alter the aerodynamic balance, but most of us will not notice. On an F1 car, if the nose dips, lots of other things come into play and not least is the fact that the main point of aerodynamic pressure moves and downforce contributes to the effectiveness of the brakes.