Tuesday March 28th, 2000

As McLaren prepares to make its case in the FIA appeals court next week, more information on the circumstances which surrounded David Coulthard's diqualification unfolds.

The FIA technical delegate, Jo Bauer, who found the McLaren front wing to be 7mm too low, has further told the stewards at the Grand Prix, that these 7mm are enough to give the McLaren a performance advantage.

Furthermore, the stewards offered McLaren, for the sake of their appeal, to ship the entire car to Paris so as to ensure a fair hearing. However, McLaren technical director, Adrian Newey, refused to this offer and instead reached mutual agreement with the scrutineers on four different sets of measurements made in Sao Paulo. Therefore, McLaren will not be able to challenge the measurement itself in the appeals court. Instead, McLaren's appeal focuses on the claim that vibrations caused by the bumpy circuit had damaged the chassis and shifted the position of the wing.

President of the FIA said yesterday, "We learnt from the Ferrari incident: we told the teams before the season that we would agree the measurements at the circuit or impound the car and take it to the court of appeal. The trouble is that this is a high-tech sport where people are always going to go to the limits to get maximum performance. When they go over those limits, then we have to exclude them."

Coulthard himself was devastated yesterday, upon returning to him home in Britain. The Scot, who selebrated his birthday yesterday, said that, "I wasn't satisfied with second place when I left the track and I'm even less happy now. We will appeal and hopefully I can have my points back and it would not all have been in vain. Formula One is a very exact scientific sport but the powers that be saw sense with Ferrari last season and hopefully they will again for me."

Formula One supremo, Bernie Ecclestone, also commented on the disqualification, saying that "If it was a genuine mistake on McLaren's side, then it's a great pity. But what can you do? There are no minor errors these days. McLaren are normally meticulous but it just shows how careful you have to be. All the money it costs to ship the cars to Brazil and the way David drove his heart out to finish just makes it a shame if it ends this way."