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.
WIRED magazine’s website has an excellent article written by Mark Seal about ‘Stepney-gate’, the spy scandal that embroiled Formula One in 2007. It involved the leaking of vital information between Ferrari and McLaren, principally from Ferrari’s Nigel Stepney to McLaren’s Michael Coughlan. The article explores Ron Dennis’ dislike of Team Red as well as the apparently innocent, if ultimately foolish, errand that brought Ron Dennis’ McLaren team to its knees. One of the introductory paragraphs reads: