The infamous Spygate scandal was the cause of Fernando Alonso’s “divorce” from McLaren, but he was unfairly blamed for causing it.
That’s according to fellow Spaniard Pedro de la Rosa, who was reserve driver at the British team in 2007 when the double world champion spent his first and only season in Woking during his first stint.
As relations between Alonso and team boss Ron Dennis deteriorated during that year, it emerged McLaren had obtained information about the car of their main rivals Ferrari.
It has since been claimed that Fernando himself caused the revelations to come out as he tried to blackmail the team into favouring him over Lewis Hamilton, De la Rosa isn’t convinced.
“That situation was like a divorce inside the team,” he told F1’s Beyond the Grid podcast. “The relationship was not good before, but that was like the complete divorce.
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“The fact the FIA knew about it raised many questions over who had passed this information to the FIA, and everyone seemed to blame Fernando for something that we didn’t know and we have zero evidence that he did.
“But the FIA knew, it could be from Ferrari, it could be from any anyone because there were many people in the team that knew about the weight distribution of Ferrari or whatever.
“So it was unfair in the way that Fernando was blamed for something that I don’t think he did. So it was the divorce point because he was looked at someone that had damaged McLaren.”
The fallout from the Spygate scandal was McLaren would be fined $100m and disqualified from the 2007 Constructors’ Championship.
However, again De la Rosa doesn’t believe that was fair.
“Still I wake up some nights with a cold sweat because I still don’t understand why we were fined 100 million,” he claimed.
“There was this theory that we were engineering a copy department of Ferrari or that we were engineering a way into Ferrari or trying to get information from Ferrari. There was nothing of that.
“We were a racing team that as with any other competitor, we tried to find information from them, which everyone does in Formula 1.
“The information we had about Ferrari was the typical information you share at a coffee machine, just speaking with engineers: Do you know what weight distribution Ferrari has, these type of questions that obviously someone in the team had the information because of a friendship at Ferrari and we shared this information.
“Did we change anything of our development, of our testing program? Nothing. Nothing changed. We didn’t use that information.”