Though Mercedes’ lawsuit does not accuse Ferrari of any wrongdoing it does stress the fact Hoyle’s actions could have given the Italian team an advantage.
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Mercedes has dominated the era of 1.6-litre V6 hybrid power units that began in F1 past year, winning consecutive constructors’ world championships and the driver titles with Lewis Hamilton. Hoyle, who intends to join Ferrari after his contract expires in December, searched for and saved files including a race report from the Hungary 2015 Grand Prix, mileage and damage data relating to Mercedes’ F1 engines and files containing code required to decrypt raw race data files, the suit alleges. That was the moment when the German carmaker realized Hoyle will join Ferrari and reassigned him to duties that were unrelated with F1.
It has won 32 of the 38 Global Positioning System in the past two seasons, finishing first and second in 23 of the races.
It has been a disappointing last 12 months for the Woking-based outfit as, alongside engine-supplier Honda, they got off to an extremely slow start and then eventually finished ninth in the team standings.
In April 16 this year Hoyle was informed, both verbally and via letter, he would be assigned to non-F1 projects, switching over to Mercedes’ DTM programme, as HPP “wished to manage the intellectual property” he was exposed to.
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Bloomberg reported that he was given a new e-mail address and proprietary data was removed from his laptop. The team has no evidence that information has been transmitted to Ferrari. Coughlan was sacked by McLaren while Ferrari dismissed Nigel Stepney, the engineer accused of passing the information to him, in what became known as “Spygate'”. However, he never worked in F1 again and died previous year when hit by a truck on a British freeway.
