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Cheat!

The Mechanics of Sabotage

Cheat!

Sony Music

True Crime, Tv & Film, Society & Culture

4.81.7K Ratings

🗓️ 8 March 2022

⏱️ 40 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In 2007, a customer walked into a copy shop to get over 700 pages of information copied onto CDs. The shop assistant, a massive Formula 1 fan, recognised the Ferrari logo on the documents and took a closer peak. It was page after page of diagrams and highly confidential notes on Ferrari’s F1 car. But the customer who brought it in was married to McLaren’s Chief Designer - one of Ferrari’s biggest rivals. A Somethin' Else production. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

It's summer. The sun is shining and a woman named Trudy is out running an errand for

0:12.8

a husband at a copy shop near her house in the UK. The copy shop was invoking, which

0:18.6

just happens to be McLaren's home town. It's 2007 and McLaren has a team competing

0:28.6

in the Formula One season. Trudy's husband works for McLaren, like a lot of people in

0:33.8

this small town. And he needs 780 pages of highly classified work documents copied

0:39.8

onto CDs. So as wipe Trudy is taking them to the store for him. The guy at the copy shop

0:48.2

is routinely sorting the order. When he notices something printed on the pages, Trudy

0:52.6

just handed him. You just had to notice the Ferrari logo and all the drawings. You might

0:58.9

not heard of McLaren, but you'll definitely have heard of Ferrari. They've got that logo

1:04.2

with the black horse prancing on his hind legs as if saying, Hey, look at me, I can do something

1:09.8

you can't like by this expensive car. Well, this dude at the copy store is looking at

1:16.8

the drawings of Ferrari cars along with detailed instructions of how to put one together.

1:22.3

Each page is stemmed with that iconic horse logo. Along with the words do not copy.

1:28.8

It just so happened to be that in a small town full of McLaren folks, this guy at the

1:33.2

copy shop was a die hard Ferrari fan. And it's strange that someone is copying documents

1:40.1

that clearly aren't meant to be copied. So he looks up the name of the customer. Trudy

1:46.4

Cochlear, wife of Mike Cochlear, the chief designer at McLaren. You see Ferrari, an Italian

1:53.9

team and McLaren, a British one, are longtime rivals. Ferrari is super old. The racing division

2:00.9

has been around since the 20s. And McLaren's F1 team came about much later in the 60s.

2:08.2

Ferrari founder Inzo Ferrari has got a thing about new teams. He dismissed them completely

2:14.4

and mocked those that didn't have the grand history of Ferrari, but still dared to challenge

2:19.1

him. He called these upstart teams, Garajisti, teams that operated out a little raggedy

...

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