Stepney blames McLaren's conduct

McLaren were fined £50m and stripped of their constructors' championship points after being found in possession of Ferrari data, leaked by Stepney.

"I don't feel responsible for what happened to them," he told Sky Sports.

"Someone used information more than I thought. It should never have been used to that extreme."

Stepney was sacked as Ferrari's head of development after it emerged he had passed more than 700 pages of confidential information to McLaren's chief designer, Mike Coughlan.

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Your views on McLaren v Ferrari in 2008

Stepney claimed he supplied the data because he had been planning to leave Ferrari for another F1 team.

Both he and Coughlan spoke to Honda team principal Nick Fry about joining his team, but ironically Honda ended up appointing Stepney's former Ferrari boss Ross Brawn as team principal.

"At the end of this year or 2007, I was looking to get out of Ferrari anyway," he said.

"My ideas were to make contact with somebody, but not to benefit; it was to talk about and see what I could do somewhere else.

"There is a lot being said, but there is a lot underneath that hasn't been said that should have been.

"It's been dramatised for various reasons, which we will have to go into at a later date.

"Some stuff has been done politically. Some stuff should have been brought out probably in a different way."

Stepney is the subject of a criminal investigation in Italy relating to the leaking of the Ferrari data.

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