The allegations of industrial espionage levelled against the Ferrari engineer Nigel Stepney and the McLaren chief designer Mike Coughlan might have amazed the outside world but will come as no surprise to the Formula One pit lane. Chicanery has been a part of racing since the very beginning.

In the early days, when sales could be directly equated with racing results, competition was cutthroat as hundreds of small car companies scrambled to survive. In 1913, a Peugeot was sent on a promotional tour of England in the care of driver Dario Resta. He was a friend of the boss of the rival Sunbeam team, Louis Coatalen, and the two dined at Coatalen’s home in Wolverhampton. While they ate, Sunbeam engineers “borrowed” the Peugeot, stripped it down, and measured and sketched every part. By morning the car was back together again and the following year Sunbeam mounted a much stronger challenge, although both Peugeot and Sunbeam were beaten by a mighty new Mercedes.

And what should happen to that Mercedes when the car of Christian Lautenschlager, who won the French Grand Prix, was in England in 1914 when war broke out? Well, the government impounded it and it was sent off to Rolls-Royce in Derby. Before long, they were busy building aero-engines that were remarka-bly similar to the Mercedes power unit.

There is a certain irony in the story of the Shadow F1 team. It was established by Don Nichols, an American who ostensibly worked in racing in Japan in the late 1960s, but in fact that was a cover for his work in covert operations for the CIA connected with the Vietnam war. Nevertheless, his Shadow team was successful in F1 and America’s CanAm sportscar racing series. In late 1977, however, a number of team members, including the designer Tony Southgate, broke away to establish the Arrows team.

The new team built their first car in just 53 days and Nichols sued because it was clear to him that the Arrows FA1 was a direct copy of his yet-to-be-launched Shadow DN9, which Southgate had designed before his departure. In the months that followed, Arrows scored some impressive results, including second in Sweden, until the High Court in London banned the car.

The 1970s saw a peak of such underhand tactics. Ground-effect aerodynamics had arrived in F1 in 1977 and the best way to learn was to get a close look at the quick cars. By 1979, Lotus had lost its lead in the technology race to Williams and, at that year’s Austrian Grand Prix, Colin Chapman instructed his team manager Peter Collins to acquire information on the Williams FW07. Collins’s recollection of the incident throws light on the underbelly of F1.

“Colin was with Mario Andretti after qualifying, and Mario told him the car was terrible. Alan Jones was on the front row in the Williams, with Mario only eighth, three seconds slower. Mario said the Williams was clearly running much stiffer rear springs than we were. ‘It doesn’t matter what springs you have, it’s the rocker ratio that counts’, Colin retorted, to which Mario replied, ‘It doesn’t matter whether it’s springs or rocker ratio, Colin, we need that information’.

“Colin turned to me and said, ‘Go and measure the Williams’. I just laughed. Then he said words to the effect of, ‘If you don’t get the information, don’t bother coming in on Monday’.”

Collins duly went and measured the back of the Williams, which had fortuitously suffered a minor shunt during a warm-up session and been left unattended under a tarpaulin. Pleased with his work, he returned to the garage, only to be chewed out by Chapman for not measuring the front of the car too. He returned to the Williams, but this proved one piece of spy-work too many and Collins was spotted.

The response of Williams was indicative of the spirit in which such activities were regarded. Patrick Head, the team’s designer, said: “I’ve a good mind to punch you on the nose. That’s no way to go racing.” No other action was taken. Indeed, at the next race Jones presented Collins with a 3ft builder’s rule on which the words “Use this but don’t get caught” were written.

Williams was a popular target in those days. Before his death in 1999, Dr Harvey Postlethwaite, Ferrari’s technical director, confessed to friends that he had led a break-in at the Williams team garage at Hockenheim in the summer of 1980. At the time, Ferrari were running the uncompetitive 312-T5 and Postlethwaite wanted to know more about the hugely successful FW07, so his engineers spent the whole night in the Williams garage.

Accusations of espionage arise every so often and from time to time there is an incident when members of rival teams are found in places where they should not be. McLaren mechanics once spotted a rival team’s aerodynamicist inside one of their trucks and locked him in to maximise the embarrassment.

Third-party espionage is something many teams indulge in, even though all claim to disapprove of it. They buy pictures of rival cars from F1 photographers and analyse what they see. Occasionally one will see a scuffle in the pitlane as a photographer known to be close to another team gets too close to a secret part.

Photographers say that they are merely meeting a demand and argue that what they do is really not that different to teams recording rival engines and using clever resonance techniques to establish the revs being reached. It is just a matter of where one draws the line.

Perhaps the greatest example of opportunism came in Austria in 1997 when the photographer Darren Heath stuck his camera into the cockpit of Mika Hak-kinen’s abandoned McLaren out on the circuit (the Finn’s engine had expired after a lap) and captured a picture of an extra pedal which, it transpired, was a key part of the “tractor” brakes that the team had been using to improve turn-in to corners.

Sabotage is almost nonexistent, though in 1991 Leyton House Racing apparently suffered from it in Phoenix, Ari-zona, at the American Grand Prix when wiring was cut and a brake line severed.

In 2001, Renault revealed that its computers had been attacked by former members of the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police, who had deleted large amounts of information about the wide-angle V10 engine. To this day it is not known to what end.

Joe Saward is the editor of grandprix.com

— The above article is a shortened version of one that will appear in the Formula One Opus, which will be published in October. Published by Kraken Sport & Media, who have produced the Manchester United and Super Bowl Opuses, it will bring the best writing and photography from over a century of motor racing together in a unique collector’s item that will cost £3,000

For further information, visit www.f1opus.com or phone 020 7213 9587