McLaren hearing will not end fighting

McLaren and Ferrari will continue to fight both on and off the track

Whether today's meeting of the FIA World Motor Sport Council in Paris will provide any genuine resolution to Formula One's current cause célèbre is a moot point. But it might throw up some answers to the more pressing questions.

It would be a start to know exactly what this is really about. On 26 July the original WMSC hearing decided that McLaren breached Article 151c of the International Sporting Code and was involved in "fraudulent conduct prejudicial to the interests of any competition and the interests of motor sport", after the chief designer Mike Coughlan was found to be in possession of confidential information belonging to Ferrari. Under collective responsibility, the WMSC deemed that McLaren were responsible for their employees.

However, the council concluded that there was insufficient evidence to punish McLaren, adding that if new evidence were to emerge the decision would be reconsidered. That became available and apparently includes messages between McLaren's two Spanish drivers, Fernando Alonso and Pedro de la Rosa, the gist of which was that Coughlan developed the championship-leading McLaren MP4/22 car using information he swore in an affidavit before an English court he had received from Ferrari's sacked head of performance development, Nigel Stepney.

The word "witch-hunt" was freely bandied about the paddock at the Italian Grand Prix at the Monza circuit at the weekend, as many see this not as the FIA seeking justice on behalf of the wronged Ferrari team, but working to a deeper agenda.

The McLaren team principal, Ron Dennis, was allegedly told in Italy that, if he were to quit the sport all of the troubles would go away.

Hopefully, we will learn today why Ferrari are not in the dock on similar charges, given that they had collective responsibility for Stepney, as well as discovering how the FIA intends to prove that McLaren's performance this year is not merely a product of the team's intense development work in Woking that accounts for a burn rate of $1m (£500,000) daily.

What today's hearing will not do is bring an end to the fight between the two leading constructors. Both McLaren and Ferrari have indicated they will go to civil litigation if things go against them in Paris.