Bernie Ecclestone and Max Mosley
Firstly, there is this snippet, buried in an article in Autosport about the famous white powder:
Barbara Pini, a lawyer assisting Stepney, said: "There were five envelopes: bills, bank balances, receipts. There was the payment - and therefore the proof - of the journey to the Philippines.
"What was lacking was the letter of his sacking by Ferrari, which was what we were most interested in. Maybe it's still at the post office."
Proof is mentioned at last! The lawyer does not say so but, for her to have mentioned it at all, the payment must prove that Stepney's visit to the Philippines was indeed booked through normal Ferrari travel arrangements. So Stepney was telling the truth on that score, at least; more importantly, however, it also means that Ferrari were not and that the whole idea of him rushing off to hide was a deliberate misrepresentation of events, designed to throw suspicion on to their employee. That is a telling point - if Ferrari are prepared to lie about that, how far can they be trusted in other assertions?
The other matter has been emerging for some time - and it's a matter of timing. Ferrari have been trying to prove that Coughlan (and perhaps McLaren) has had the documents longer than suspected before. As detailed in Autosport's summary of events so far, it may be that some of the documents at least were floating around in England as early as March this year.
And March was when McLaren sent their carefully-worded protest about movable floors to the FIA. Suddenly we see why the dates are so important to Ferrari; they want to create suspicion that McLaren used information gained from the documents to cause problems for the Italian team. Although Ferrari have always denied it, there have been suggestions that the FIA's tightening of the rules regarding movable floors hurt the Ferrari cars' performance more than anyone else's.
Effectively, Ferrari would like to prove that McLaren's protest was based on knowledge gained from their illegal possession of the documents. But that ignores the fact that the movable floors were a deliberate circumvention of F1 rules; the charge of cheating is not invalidated by any cheating done by the accuser. If Ferrari's proposed scenario is correct, then both are as underhand as each other.
Now we have the situation in which the FIA have summoned McLaren to defend itself over the charge that they had unauthorized possession of the documents. My fear is that the FIA will deliver one of their illogical verdicts and penalize McLaren for having an employee who might have used information from the documents to help McLaren in its competition with Ferrari. That will effectively hand the world championships for this year to Ferrari and its drivers and, once again, the FIA will be suspected of being biased towards the Italian team.
This has happened so many times before that we might think that F1 will just shrug its shoulders and continue. But something has changed of late and there may be major repercussions from anything the FIA decide; the manufacturers are now the dominant force in F1.
How will Mercedes and BMW, Toyota and Honda feel when they see the FIA bowing to the whim of Ferrari yet again? It might occur to them that winning the championship is even more difficult than they had suspected, that the FIA might well favor Ferrari again in any future disputes between F1 teams. Some time ago I predicted that the agreement between the FIA and the manufacturers would come under strain when the interests of one manufacturer conflicted with those of another; it may be that this is happening already.
Couple all this with Bernie's failure to agree terms for a continuing GP at Indianapolis, and the manufacturers have considerable cause for discontent with the way F1 is being managed. While Bernie blithely asserts that F1 does not need a race in the States, the fact is that the American market is crucial to at least four of the manufacturers.
All in all, I see a major struggle for power in F1 on its way. And this time, I think Max and Bernie have taken on a bigger opponent than they can beat. Whether the FIA like it or not, the manufacturers now own F1 and they are going to want it to play by their rules, not by the nonsense spouted by the Max and Bernie show.
Meanwhile the fans see their favorite sport being destroyed and talk of alternative series to take its place...