Nigel Stepney, the key figure in the 2007 Formula 1 spygate ordeal, was killed on Friday after being hit by a truck on a British motorway.
Stepney had stopped his vehicle on the hard shoulder and had stepped out of the car before being hit. A statement from Kent Police reads:
For reasons yet to be established, the man appears to have entered the carriageway and was then in a collision with an articulated goods vehicle. He was pronounced deceased at the scene.
Ferrari’s Technical Director Ross Brawn left the team at the end of 2006 and Stepney, formerly Ferrari’s Race and Test Technical Manager, had publicly declared his dissatisfaction with the role he was given after the team restructured its operations ahead of the 2007 season.
Stepney was later found guilty of leaking 780 pages of confidential information to his friend Michael Coughlan then the chief designer at McLaren. Copies of the documents were made by Coughlan’s wife at a copy centre. Staff from the copy centre thought something wasn’t right and contacted Ferrari and formal investigations began. Stepney was handed a 20 month sentence by an Italian court, although he did not serve any jail time. He didn’t work in F1 again.
Since 2010 Stepney had been working as the Race Team Manager and Technical Director for JRM who compete in endurance racing, including the LMP1, GT1 and GT3 categories. A team statement can be read after the break.
Stepney started in F1 in the late 1970s with the Shadow team and made his name at Lotus working alongside Ayrton Senna in the mid-1980s. He was later part of the Ferrari dream team, along with Brawn, Rory Byrne and Michael Schumacher, who combined to end Ferrari long championship drought before dominating the sport in the 2000s.
Nigel Stepney 1958–2014
Daventry UK, 2 May 2014: JRM regrets to announce that Nigel Stepney, the company’s Racing Team Manager and Technical Director, was killed in a car accident this morning. He was 56 years-old and leaves his loving partner and daughter, Ash and Sabine Stepney.
Nigel Joined JRM in 2010 after a long and distinguished career in Formula One. He was the driving force behind the development of the Nissan GT-R GT car in JRM’s role as the Official Partner of Nissan Motorsports International (Nismo).
Under Nigel’s excellent stewardship, JRM won the 2011 FIA GT1 World Championship with Michael Krumm and Lucas Luhr—a success that was also rewarded with JRM receiving the coveted RAC Tourist Trophy.
A year later, Nigel led JRM into the World Endurance Championship with an LMP1-specification Honda. The team finished the season third overall in the LMP1 category and also claimed sixth place at the Le Mans 24h.
In 2013, Nigel continued to mastermind the development of the Nissan GT-R Nismo GT3—a car that Nissan’s GT Academy team, RJN, drove to both the PRO AM Drivers’ and Teams’ titles in the Blancpain Endurance Series.
Nigel had most recently plotted the continued development of the 2014-specification Nissan GT-R Nismo GT3 and was scheduled to head up the JRM engineering team that will support the many customers using the car across the world this season.
James Rumsey, the owner of JRM, paid tribute to Nigel. He said: “From the moment Nigel joined JRM in 2010, he was a vitally important member of the team and brought a level of engineering experience to us that was unrivalled.
“A man that engineered Ayrton Senna at Lotus and helped to guide Michael Schumacher to five Formula One world championships with Ferrari was the perfect candidate to establish JRM as a serious team in circuit-based motorsport and the role that he played in achieving that standard will never be underestimated or forgotten.
“Nigel was an intense and fierce competitor and always strived for excellence in our racing. We certainly could not have achieved our level of success without his leadership and experience. Away from the track, he was a focused, driven and passionate member of the JRM Group, and a loving father to his family.
“The rest of the engineering and race team here at JRM learned an unimaginable amount from Nigel in the four short years he was with us and his death this morning has shocked everyone to the core. Today, the motorsport world has lost one of its greatest characters and competitors. He will be sorely missed and we send our sincere condolences to his family and the many friends he leaves behind. Our prayers and thoughts are with Ash and Sabine.â€