F1 team’s 2008 car under suspicion?

Renault’s Director of Engineering, Pat Symonds, has shrugged off suggestions that his team’s 2008 car, the dog-ugly R28, is somehow implicated in last year’s spying scandals.

It has emerged that Renault delayed using a suspension innovation until recently, following the scandal surrounding engineer Phil Mackereth, who defection to Renault from McLaren in 2007. Mackereth was accused of bringing over McLaren technical secrets to Renault - something he did without the knowledge of the French team.

In the World Motor Sport Council hearings before Christmas, it was revealed that among Mackereth’s McLaren drawings was a device referred to as a “J-damper”.

It has been suggested that the R28 now features similar suspension technology, a claim flatly denied by Symonds:

“I don’t know. What’s a J-damper?” he said at Montreal last weekend.

“If you can tell me what that is, I can tell you whether we’ve got one, I guess. It’s not an engineering term… All I can say is that everything on our car has been checked by the FIA.”