Max Mosley, the FIA president, has revealed that any Formula One team caught spying in the future faces expulsion from the championship.

McLaren were fined £50 million and kicked out of the 2007 constructors’ championship by the FIA’s World Motor Sport Council in September after they were found guilty of being in illegal possession of Ferrari technical data.

However, their drivers, Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso, were allowed to retain their championship points and fight for the drivers’ crown.

But Mosley has warned that such leniency would not be exercised were there to be a repeat incident. “You can never stop what someone has got in his head, but we can stop the transfer of information in written or electronic form,” he said.

“And if you are prepared to check - and we have demonstrated that we are - then somebody using such information would be very unwise because in a modern F1 team you cannot do it without leaving traces, and we will find those traces.

“Next time, whoever it was, I don’t think they would stay in the championship.

“In the case of McLaren everybody said ’oh, a hundred million dollars’, but the alternative would have been to exclude them - and that would have been more expensive!”