05/11/2003
FEATURE BY MIKE LAWRENCE
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The German police have raided Toyota's Formula One base, seized software and arrested an unnamed individual who, apparently, used to work for Ferrari as an aerodynamicist. It is reported that the move by the German police came as a result of a complaint from Ferrari to the Modena police. It must be stressed that the action has been taken against an individual and not the Toyota team. Further, we must assume that the individual is innocent unless proven guilty.
The case may not be open and shut. When engineers change teams, they take with them a great deal of information. There is no doubt that teams have offered excellent terms to some engineers on this basis alone. The new guy arrives at Tweedledee F1 from Tweedledum Grand Prix and he has to change loyalties and part of his mission is to tell Tweedledee everything he knows about Tweedledum, which is now a rival.
This is why, when Adrian Newey, wished to join McLaren, Williams refused to release him from his contract. Williams also refused to have him round the factory so he was sent home on 'gardening leave', legally bound not to have any contact with McLaren while Williams continued to pay him.
Newey's brain could not be wiped clean of everything he knew about Williams's plans, of course, but Williams could ensure he learned nothing new.
It is a rare job where this is an issue. In practically any occupation you can name, you can leave one job on a Friday and start another on the following Monday, and the same is also true about most jobs in motor racing. It's the people with the inside knowledge who are regarded as risks.
It would seem the current case alleges theft. If so, it will not be the first case. In the early 1970s three McLaren employees stole a complete set of plans for a McLaren Indycar. Two skipped to America, where a McLaren copy was made. The third received a three-month prison sentence for industrial espionage.
The McLaren copy raced at Indianapolis in 1970 and 1971, never made anywhere near the front of the grid and did not finish in either year.
That was an open-and-shut case. Plans were filched one weekend when the factory was closed. The blueprints would have been a huge bundle of paper, but now you could have it all on a single CD which you could take out in your Walkman. Is it really as simple as as some movies suggest? A new genre of films involving computers has developed and there seems no end to the number where the plot revolves around a disk or CD will a value beyond your weight in diamonds.
Let me put a hypothetical case. You are working for Tweedledum and, before you take up your new post with Tweedledee, you feel that you would like to take data with you. You are not going to tell anyone at Tweedledee that you have this data, but rather you are going to use it to make yourself look absolutely brilliant. In fact, you cannot afford to tell a single person, not only might word get out, but you are not going to look so brilliant and, besides, nobody will trust you ever again.
You are not going to be able to simply burn a CD during your lunch break. It used to be able to happen, and happen it did. It used to be as easy as making a copy of a friend's tape of Spears Sings Stockhausen. Computer Assisted Design (CAD) took longer to reach motor racing than it did in the regular car industry and I suspect that the ease that early systems permitted the transfer of information was part of the reason. We speak of Formula One, where everyone has an angle.
I don't know what CAD systems are used in the factories of Formula One teams, but I am prepared to bet that it takes a great deal more to download stuff from them than you or I downloading Michael Flatley Taps The Best of Elvis from the Internet. I should imagine it takes a great deal more cunning to download from an F1-spec CAD system than going into an empty factory at a weekend and running off a set of blueprints.
The problem with industrial espionage is that it is a morally ambiguous area. I have copied tape cassettes which makes me a thief, but ask me if I have ever stolen anything and I will admit only to once scrumping apples as a kid. Ask yourself, if you were offered a copy of a favourite disc, would you accept it? Is that really so different from going into a shop and nicking a CD?
If someone passed off a piece of my writing as their own, I'd be the first to invoke copyright law, yet I have happily broken it by copying cassettes.
Take someone downloading from Tweedledum. What is actually stolen? The answer is intellectual property, but that is endemic in motor racing. As soon as Lotus came up with a ground effect car, all other teams were quick to copy. One designer was actually discovered in the Lotus pit garage with a tape measure.
It used to be customary for Tamiya to make a 1:12 model kit of the car which won the World Championship, and this was prepared from factory blueprints. It is said that, on one occasion, the blueprints were intercepted which is why one car looked suspiciously like the Championship winner of the previous year. Tamiya itself was not involved, the scam was done in Europe.
What if the team had waited until the kit came out? Tamiya kits are so special you really could build a car from them.
It is accepted that Patrick Head took a long hard look at the Lotus 79 and understood what made it tick. The Williams FW07 was a Lotus 79 which had been processed by Patrick's brain. It was not a direct copy, in fact it was a much better car. The Lotus 79 had a huge aerodynamic advantage which disguised the fact that the basic chassis was not that good. The Lotus 79 was groundbreaking, and has a mighty reputation, but it actually won only six races and then in a window of just a few weeks: 27th May to 25th August, 1978.
Mario Andretti took one look at the FW07 in 1979 and commented that is what his Lotus should look like. The Williams was better engineered all round. Patrick Head grasped all the principles of ground effect whereas Colin Chapman did not, hence the utterly disastrous Lotus 80.
For 1981 Robin Herd, co-founder of March Engineering, and John MacDonald of RAM Racing, formed a new team called March Grand Prix. MacDonald had been running second-hand Williams FW07s. A team was assembled at March Engines, away from the regular factory, to make a rivet-for-rivet copy of one of MacDonald's FW07s. Was this a breach of copyright?
Had the car worked, it may have been. The guys at March were used to churning out production racing cars and so cut corners. They used cheaper materials and the monocoque had to be re-skinned at its first race because it was flexing. Patrick Head's design had a subtle curve at the rear of the sidepods. The March Grand Prix crew simply squared them for cheapness - and lost half the downforce.
One question is, would Frank Williams have sued had the March 811 worked? Another is, would he have won since he had sold the car to MacDonald? Once you have bought a racing car, you can change it however you like. You break a wishbone, do you have to buy a replacement from the original maker, or can you make your own? If you can make one wishbone, you can make two, you can make twenty. Can you make a new monocoque? At what point do you cease to service your own property and become guilty of stealing intellectual copyright?
Arrows was formed for the 1978 season when key personnel defected from Shadow. The Arrows FA1 looked suspiciously like the Shadow DN9. A court case ensued and Arrows lost, thus beginning a long tradition. All the Arrows FA1s had to be handed over to Shadow.
Tony Southgate had been Chief Designer at Shadow and he became chief at Arrows. Part of the evidence in the court case was a Shadow clutch pedal was found at the Arrows factory. Tony's defence went along the lines that if he had designed the ultimate clutch pedal (we'll call it 100%) and changed teams, then he was bound to design an inferior clutch pedal (99%) and, every time he changed teams, he had to make an evermore inferior pedal.
Had Tony designed the ultimate, the 100%, clutch pedal, could he forget it? Could he retain his integrity by deliberately designing an inferior one just so it was different? What is the limit to what an employer obtains when he plays a salary? Tony had previously been Chief Designer at Lotus, he went to Shadow aware of the Lotus ground effect programme, could he forget what he knew?
The whole question of intellectual property is a minefield, like plagiarism. Put together an article using one source and it is plagiarism, use two and it becomes research. Play around with a theme by Bach and it is creative, play around with a theme by a living composer and it is a breach of copyright. A musician may imagine that he has composed a new tune when it may have been something he heard in childhood and not heard thereafter. The musician may be entirely innocent of knowingly copying. The difference between murder and manslaughter is not the stiff, it is motive and premeditation, and if you are ever in the dock having been found with a smoking gun in your hand, it is a distinction which will have your undivided attention.
If you are a photographer and you snap a new tweak on a Tweedledee parked in the pitlane, you can sell it to every other team. If you slip uninvited into the Tweedledee garage to take a similar picture, you had better tread carefully, but are you guilty of theft? You have not physically stolen anything, you have merely used a camera to make an image of something which exists.
What would be the position if you played with that image on a computer and sold a subtly altered version of the reality?
The case against the unnamed individual, if it ever comes to court, will be very interesting. Motor racing is a special case because anything that can be copied has always been copied. When assessing the merit of designs from the past there is a simple question to ask: Was it good enough to be copied? That question alone raises a great number of moral and legal issues, not that morality has ever been a serious consideration in motor racing.
To check out Mike's previous articles for pitpass... click here