Engineer claims some breached August shutdown pact

Nico Rosberg driving the Mercedes W03 F1 car

An unnamed engineer has alleged that some teams broke the 'gentleman's agreement' governing the factory shutdowns during F1's recent August break.

As per an unofficial cost-cutting pact, the twelve competing teams all agreed to close their doors for a full 14-day period.

During that time, the teams pledged to do almost no official F1 business -- not even the sending of a single email.

But some teams broke the agreement, the unnamed engineer claims.

"The factories were, for the most part, closed," the anonymous source told the Spanish newspaper El Pais' correspondent Oriol Puigdemont at Spa.

"But what was done was that some work was put in the hands of suppliers, who continued to make parts in August," he claimed.

"I know firsthand that some teams, like Sauber and Williams for example, told their workers to shut down their computers on the last day of work and leave them at the factory.

"But there were others, like Ferrari, who never did that," the unnamed engineer said.

"The restrictions (of the shutdown) were very vague, and cheating very simple. You could just create a parallel email account.

"Also, if someone looked at the log of communications and you have talked to one of your colleagues, you could just argue that it's just your friend who is in the same team," the source added.

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