McLaren's 2008 car?

[hmmm - donuts]

I see that the part of the FIA's penalty dished out to McLaren is that their 2008 car is to be checked for any Ferarri intellectual property that might have been obtained from the 780 page dossier. Is anyone able to explain how the FIA would go about proving this one way or the other? After all, the cars are so similar these days, and I guess that the designers are often likely to arrive at similar solutions to similar problems. Checking the 2008 car for Ferarri influence (and not just any Ferarri influence, but influence specifically from the dossier) sounds scarily subjective to me.

Regards

[I am evil Homer]

Indeed...presumably they'll want the technical specs and drawings from McLaren prior to the first race and will then check those against the Ferrari. Who/how they do that will no doubt cause some controversy.

And it's a shame they didn't do it with Sauber/Ferrari and Honda/SA after all the rumours in the paddock about those respective cars.

[Hawkmoon]

Apparently McLaren were going to designate the '08 car the MP4-F2007 but have decided against it as it didn't sound quite right.

:D

[janneppi]

MP4-F2008 won't raise as much suspicison. :p :

[ChrisS]

I'm not an expert in copyrights of intellectual property, but from the few things I did in Uni you cant copyright an idea, just the way you put the idea into physical form so using the same idea to resolve a problem wont be a problem as long as the physical form is not the same.

McLaren has plenty of time to get rid of any Ferrari intellectual property from their design, so I dont think anyone will expect McLaren to be banned next season.

[555-04Q2]

This all so that the FIA can give Ferrari a copy of the 2008 Mclaren car design ;)