Formula One: New Season, New Conspiracy Theories

With the new season being only a week old, the newest conspiracy theory on the Formula One block is that the new Electronics Control Unit made by McLaren and Microsoft are intentionally giving the infamous Blue Screen of Death to any car that has a Ferrari engine block in it as revenge for the penalties of the 2007 Stepneygate spy scandal. This scandal threw McLaren out of the constructor's championship, all points were revoked, and the team was fined $100 million. Quite a steep punishment, and no doubt, anyone who was on the wrong end of that punishment would want to seek retribution.

It is interesting to note that of the six of the 22 cars that had Ferrari engines on the field for the Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne this past weekend, none of them passed the checkered flag. This could possibly be attributed to having a new system that is not suited to the original, similar to how a transplanted organ would be rejected by the body after surgery.

McLaren and Ferrari are bitter rivals.  Earlier this week, to add fuel to the conspiracy theory fire, Michael Schumacher said, but never clarified, that the problems encountered in the last weekend were not of the engines themselves. Quite a head-scratcher. Was he trying to say that McLaren were to blame for them not finishing?

A Formula One car today is not just an engine, wheels and bodywork; there are many components to the car. The problems could have been from any one of the hundreds of thousands of parts from a loose screw to something huge. To fully blame McLaren's ECU would not be correct. If, for the sake of argument, the ECU was to blame, then Microsoft (not necessarily McLaren) would have to work with Ferrari and every other team to find a suitable configuration of both ECU and racing machine, so that we don't experience another BSoD.

Anyhow, conspiracy theories are fun to look at, and since Formula One is a rather secretive sport in terms of development, the discreetness just adds more to the nature of the conspiracies. Quite exciting, wouldn't you say?