What was the Spygate scandal? Why was McLaren disqualified from the 2007 F1 championship?

Back in 2007, McLaren was neck-deep in one of the most controversial and shocking scandals in F1. The offense is now famously known as 'Spygate' since it concerned Ferrari's confidential information about its F1 car being stolen by the British team.

The case was so huge that the FIA had to strip McLaren from the constructors' championship and only allow its drivers to race for their championship.

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The entire saga of 'Spygate' that resulted in McLaren's suspension from the 2008 F1 championship

In June 2007, Ferrari filed a formal complaint against its head of team performance development Nigel Stepney. In July, Ferrari conducted an internal investigation and suspended Stepney based on "irregularities discovered at the Ferrari factory," according to the team's spokesperson Luca Colajanni.

As soon as the Italian giants suspended Stepney, it announced taking action against a member of the McLaren F1 team, later revealed to be Mike Coughlan. As a result, the British team suspended Coughlan.

After this, the entire reason for Ferrari's complaints was revealed in one of its press releases, in which it claimed that Nigel Stepney and a McLaren employee were involved in the theft of technical information from them. Ferrari took legal action and a search warrant against the rival team's employee.

In a High Court hearing in July, several details emerged that Mike Coughlan is alleged by Ferrari to possess a 780-page document of the Italian team.

Furthermore, his wife is also alleged to have taken the documents to a photocopying shop near Woking. The staff member of the photocopying shop blew the whistle by contacting Ferrari's headquarters in Italy, which started the chain of events that led to the massive scandal.

After the court hearing, Ferrari and Mr. and Mrs. Coughlan agreed that the team would drop the court case against them in return for full transparency in the matter.

A few days after the court hearing, McLaren itself conducted an internal investigation and revealed that no Ferrari document was found with any other team member apart from the one sued by the Italian team. Furthermore, McLaren claimed that the document possessed by Mike Coughlan had not been passed on to any other team member.

The FIA themselves initiated their investigation into the matter and soon found out that McLaren had the documents, but its car did not have any design elements copied from Ferrari's design secrets that were in the documents themselves.

Nonetheless, McLaren was disqualified from the 2007 F1 constructors' championship and handed a whopping $100,000,000 fine.