Engineer Evan Short remembers starting his Formula 1 career as a “radio spy” at Ferrari, where he hacked into the radio feed of then-rivals McLaren.
These two teams are among the oldest in the Formula 1 paddock – Ferrari having been there since day one in 1950 – and the Scuderia and McLaren have found themselves accustomed to battling for the title over the years, most recently the last year…
The year following McLaren's penultimate Constructors' Championship triumph (in 1998), Evan Short arrived at Ferrari, as the Scuderia sought to beat McLaren, which it ultimately did, by four points in 1999.
Short – now head of track electronics at Mercedes F1 – revealed his first role at Ferrari was to find a way to access McLaren's radio communications feed, which he succeeded in, until 'an engineer named Tyler discovers it.
“My first job was as a radio spy.”
“The communication channel was not open like today. Teams like McLaren encrypted their radio. As it was Ferrari's main competitor, my job was to find a way to intercept it.”
“It was arguably morally forbidden. At the time, analog encryption relied on automatically mixing communication into a sequence of radio frequencies.”
-“One of McLaren's sponsors was an encryption company, and I knew they only used a limited combination of footage.”
“So I built something that tracked each combination. McLaren used the same one for an entire race weekend. That meant that once I found it, I could track the communication.”
“We did it for about two years before McLaren discovered it. We were reacting to things on the track that we couldn't otherwise know about. They had an engineer called Tyler.”
“He suspected we were listening to him and started sarcastically saying hello to my boss (Jean Todt) on the radio.”
