Well the FIA have published their report on yesterday’s meeting and it makes interesting reading.

I can almost understand now why the driver’s points were unaffected, as the decision doesn’t seem to be based on the fact that the cars themselves are illegal as they stand now - rather the charges are that McLaren were in receipt of confidential information and that knowledge of the information was much more widespread than initially thought.

I still disagree with this and think it’s impossible to determine how much of an advantage they have gained through testing, knowing Ferrari fuel strategies and suchlike - and if I was a driver on the grid I would be less than happy that Hamilton and Alonso will be lining up alongside me at the grand prix this weekend.  I’m surprised Ferrari aren’t making more noise about this, though perhaps they are just happy to have been handed the Constructor’s Championship.

In all this, it would still appear that Ron Dennis genuinely didn’t know anything about it and that must be slightly baffling for him.  If not, then it begs the question why not?  The man in charge of a business like McLaren can’t be expected to know every little thing, but being handed your main rival’s secrets can’t really be described as a little thing!

The fact that noone in the supposed chain of command thought it an idea to pass the information further up until it reached Ron Dennis is quite staggering - surely someone must have took a step back and thought “Hang on a minute, what we have here isn’t right.”  It would appear from the evidence that some people are now saying they did have those thoughts but they went about things in the wrong way.  Rather than confessing all, they tried to cover it all up and that rarely works.

Pedro de la Rosa seems to be the man getting most of the attention in the report - but the WMSC doesn’t seem to believe that his story is 100% genuine and I must admit I agree with them.  If the McLaren version of events is to be believed then de la Rosa has a lot of responsibility - he decides what is run on the simulator, what type of gas to try out in the tyres etc and I simply don’t believe that would be the case.

If this evidence is all correct, then I don’t see how McLaren can appeal - unless they decide that the evidence is right, but the punishment is too extreme.

As has been seen in the past, the FIA has a habit of increasing rather than decreasing penalties imposed in cases like this.