Mike Coughlan, the chief designer of the McLaren Mercedes Formula One team, and his wife, Trudy, were described as behaving “disgracefully” in receiving and then copying a huge dossier of secret information belonging to Ferrari, a court in London heard yesterday.

As the Formula One espionage scandal moved into the High Court, where a preliminary hearing into the case was held, Nigel Tozzi, QC, a lawyer for Ferrari, said of the couple: “Their conduct by taking these documents knowing that they were not entitled to them, keeping them and copying them – on any view they behaved disgracefully.”

Tozzi, who named the Coughlans as the defendants in Ferrari’s action, said that the Italian team would have been “blissfully ignorant” about the theft of their documents had it not been for a “tip-off” Ferrari received.

This came from a staff member in a printing shop near the Coughlans’ home in Surrey where the documents were taken for photocopying. The staff member in the shop saw that they were confidential and belonged to Ferrari and, after copying them, decided to contact the team’s headquarters in Italy.

Until yesterday it was thought that the dossier allegedly given to Coughlan by Nigel Stepney, the disaffected former Ferrari mechanic who is facing a criminal investigation in Italy, ran to about 500 pages. However, Tozzi told Mr Justice Briggs that some 780 pages of documents had been recovered from the Coughlans’ home, along with two computer discs on which the documents had been copied.

An ashen-faced Coughlan was present in Court 59, but he did not speak during the hearing and refused to answer reporters’ questions before and after it. The McLaren design chief, who has been suspended pending the outcome of the case, is facing legal bills estimated at £50,000 after the judge ordered him to pay costs incurred by Ferrari in having his home searched last week by an independent firm of solicitors.

Tozzi argued that the Coughlans should be made to pay the highest “indemnity” level of costs, but the judge said that they would pay at the standard level because they had “conducted themselves in a highly cooperative and productive manner during the search” and since then.

The court heard that Ferrari have yet to search through the documents taken. These have been reported to amount to a virtual blueprint of the Italian team’s operations on and off the race track.

The Coughlans were given until this morning to hand in to the court sworn statements detailing everything they know about the stolen material, but it was not clear whether they will do so for fear of incriminating themselves in any legal action in Italy.

No details were given at the hearing about how Ferrari allege the Coughlans came into possession of the documents.

It seems that Mike Coughlan was not the only McLaren employee who knew about the documents. The court was told that Jonathan Neale, the team managing director, was also aware of them, although it was not clear whether he knew of their existence before or after Ferrari’s legal action began against Coughlan. Tozzi told the court: “It is unclear when and how Neale was told about the documents.”

The hearing came as sources at Ferrari revealed that the team have asked McLaren – who have claimed that Coughlan was the only person in the team who knew about the Ferrari material – to clarify what Neale knew and when he knew it.

Neale is not the subject of legal action by Ferrari. The team have also asked to see the contents of a computer, described as owned by a “third party”, that Ferrari believe was used by Coughlan.

— Christijan Albers, the Dutch driver, has been dismissed by the Spyker team, making him the first driver to be let go this season. Albers has been outpaced by Adrian Sutil, his teammate, and made a big error at the French Grand Prix on July 1 when he exited the pitlane with the fuel hose attached to his car. There is no word on who will replace him. Among those thought to be in consideration for the seat are Christian Klien, Marc Gene and Narain Karthikeyan.