Nigel Stepney, the former Ferrari mechanic who sparked the Ferrari/ McLaren Mercedes espionage scandal last year, has admitted that he handed information to McLaren, but did not imagine that it would be used by the Woking-based team to the degree that it was.

Stepney, who is the subject of legal proceedings in Italy over allegations that he gave a large dossier of Ferrari secret technical information to McLaren, also said that he does not wish to return to Formula One, but hopes to work elsewhere in motor sport. “I don’t feel responsible in anyway for what happened at McLaren,” Stepney said in an interview due to be transmitted on Sky Sports’ World Motor Sport show this evening. “My original [intention], or my ideas, were to make contact with somebody, but not to benefit [myself]; it was to talk about and see what I could do somewhere else with a group of people.

“Obviously it got a bit sensitive and somebody used information more than I actually thought it [should have been] – or not more than it should have been, it should never have been used . . . to that extreme.”

Stepney’s remarks, in his first British television interview since he was sacked by Ferrari, confirm that one of the reasons he made contact with Mike Coughlan, the disgraced former design director at McLaren, was because they were both planning to leave their teams and move to a new employer, widely thought to have been Honda.

The British mechanic said that the “intention was to put a group of people together and talk”. As for himself, he said: “I think, at the end of this year or at the end of 2007, I was looking to get out of Ferrari anyway; whether it was going to be in Formula One I wasn’t quite sure. I think Formula One was going away from a direction I really wanted to go.”

Stepney said that he hopes to be back working in the sport, but not Formula One, this year. “I’ve got a lot of other more interesting opportunities going back into . . . the grass roots of motor racing,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong, Formula One I’ve worked in for many years, I’ve enjoyed it, I’ve made a living out of it, it’s been a very good experience in life, but I think I . . . prefer to go into a sort of a grassroots racing again.”