LONDON: Former Ferrari engineer Nigel Stepney, who was sacked by the Formula One team after being accused of sabotage and leaking confidential data to McLaren in 2007, has died in a road accident on Friday morning.
Kent Police said in a statement that a 56-year-old, confirmed to be Stepney, was hit by a truck at 1:28am after stopping his van on the hard shoulder of the M20 motorway at Ashford.
“For reasons yet to be established, the man appears to have entered the carriageway and was then in collision with an articulated goods vehicle. He was pronounced deceased at the scene,” the police said.
McLaren were fined a record $100 million by the International Automobile Federation and stripped of all their constructors’ points in 2007 after being found guilty of possessing a 780-page dossier of Ferrari data.
Stepney and McLaren’s then-chief designer Mike Coughlan, who had the information at his home, were sacked by their teams.
The FIA recommended that teams should have no professional ties with him for two years and he never worked in F1 again.
Stepney denied a charge of sabotage, but was found guilty by an Italian court.
Before the Spygate affair, Stepney had an impressive F1 resume, having worked with Ayrton Senna at Lotus and Michael Schumacher at Ferrari. (Reuters)