MOTORSPORT: Mercedes sues engineer for data theft

Mercedes-Benz has taken legal action against one of its most brilliant engineers to stop him joining Ferrari, claiming he’s holding secrets to its hybrid racing technology even though it removed him from its Formula 1 program 18 months ago.

Mercedes claims Benjamin Hoyle copied files after this year’s Hungarian Grand Prix in late July and that his “actions were calculated to destroy or seriously damage the relationship of trust” between him and the company.

Hoyle told Mercedes on May 21 last year that he would resign at the expiry of his contract at the end of this month.

It discovered that he intended to join Ferrari, now its main rival in F1.

“Mr Hoyle and potentially Ferrari have gained an unlawful advantage,” Mercedes said in legal documents filed on October 19 and now revealed by the Bloomberg financial news service.

A Ferrari spokesman told Bloomberg that the Italian company held talks with Hoyle about employing him but that he never signed a contract and was not joining it “in the foreseeable future”.

Hoyle joined Mercedes AMG High Performance Powertrains at Brixworth in England in 2012 as one of four team leaders.

Mercedes has dominated the era of 1.6-litre V6 hybrid power units that began in F1 last year, winning consecutive constructors’ world championships and the driver titles with Lewis Hamilton.

It has won 32 of the 38 GPs in the past two seasons, finishing first and second in 23 of the races.

It also has supplied its units to three other teams both seasons.

The legal paperwork now revealed says that Mercedes reassigned Hoyle to duties unrelated to F1 once it discovered he intended to join Ferrari.

Bloomberg reported that he was given a new e-mail address and proprietary data was removed from his laptop.

Mercedes has claimed that Hoyle was found to have looked at internal race reports after his reassignment, taken confidential data – including code required to decrypt files – and then deleted information on his own equipment to conceal wrongdoing.

It has demanded that Hoyle return all material, pay its legal fees, and that he not join Ferrari or any other F1 competitor before 2017.

F1 has had numerous cases of disputes over sensitive technical information, including when Toyota hired Ferrari engineers as it started its now-defunct team early this century.

Most famous though was ‘Spygate’ in 2007, when Ferrari’s Nigel Stepney was accused of funnelling 800 pages of information to McLaren, which was fined US$100 million and disqualified from that year’s constructors’ championship.

Stepney, who had worked with Michael Schumacher as he won seven world titles, was sentenced in Italy to 20 months’ jail but did not serve time. However, he never worked in F1 again and died last year when hit by a truck on a British freeway.