Inside the Scandal That Rocked the Formula One Racing World

Of all the copy shops in all of England, Trudy Coughlan had the rotten luck of walking into Document Image Processing.

It was June 2007 in sleepy Surrey County, and Coughlan, a statuesque blonde, sauntered through the door of the shop holding a sheaf of 780 pages. Scan them onto two CDs, she told the clerk, a forgettable middle-aged guy in a forgettable office park in the middle of nowhere. Nothing strange about the order, unless you happened to be a Formula One fan and happened to take a close look at the material: schematic drawings, technical reports, pictures, and financial information — enough insider dope to design a Formula One race car. Each page was emblazoned with one of the most famous logos in the world: the prancing black horse of Ferrari.

Surrey is McLaren country, just down the road from what locals call the Spaceship, the futuristic, top-secret, half underground headquarters of the McLaren Formula One racing team. But as it happened, the copy clerk was a rabid Ferrari fan — among the legion who worshipped Ferrari's star F1 driver Michael Schumacher and agonized over the fact that the Ferrari team was lagging behind top-ranked McLaren that summer.

"Trudy Coughlan," the woman said when he asked her name.

When she left, the clerk Googled.

First he Googled Trudy Coughlan and discovered she was the wife of Michael Coughlan, chief designer of ... McLaren's Formula One racing team.

Then he Googled Ferrari until he found the name and email address of the company's Formula One sporting director, Stefano Domenicali, in Maranello, Italy.

"Dear Mr. Domenicali," the clerk typed. He proceeded to spill the strange tale of the woman with the stack of what appeared to be top-secret Ferrari documents.

The next morning, as Domenicali sifted through his inbox, he came to the missive from Surrey. He immediately forwarded it to Ferrari security.

A few days later, Trudy Coughlan picked up the two CDs, along with the 780 pages of documents. Following her husband's instructions, she destroyed the papers in a home shredder and burned the remains in their back garden.

Thus began the biggest scandal ever to rock the world of Formula One racing.

Formula One is a deafeningly loud, extraordinarily expensive, rock-star-meets-the-road spectacle. It's a multinational pastime in Europe, where hundreds of thousands of fans pay up to $1,000 a ticket to watch 22 drivers from 11 teams go around complex circuits at 200 miles per hour. In a series of 18 races (or Grand Prix) in Monaco, Turkey, Japan, Brazil, Bahrain, and elsewhere, the drivers compete for points based on their place at the finish of each race. At the end of every March-to-November season, the circuit's highest point earners are crowned in two ways: by team (the Constructors' Championship) and by driver (the Drivers' Championship).

While the drivers with multimillion-dollar contracts command the attention and acclaim, the real competitors in Formula One are the cars themselves: ultralight, mid-engine, open-cockpit marvels of precision engineering, power, and speed. "The difference in raw driving ability between the fastest and the slowest driver is unlikely to be more than one second per lap," says Autosport writer Mark Hughes. "The difference between the fastest and slowest car is perhaps three or even four seconds per lap. So the fastest driver in the slowest car would still be nowhere, whereas the slowest driver in the fastest car would be quite successful."