Engineer Evan Short remembers having started his Formula 1 career as a “radio spy” at Ferrari, where he hacked the radio flow of his rivals at the time, McLaren.
These two teams are among the oldest of the formula 1 – Ferrari paddock being there since the first day in 1950 – and the Scuderia and McLaren have been used to fighting for the title over the years, the last time the last year ..
The year following the penultimate triumph of McLaren at the manufacturer championship (in 1998), Evan Short arrived at Ferrari, while the Scuderia sought to beat McLaren, which she finally did, four points in 1999.
Short – Now responsible for electronics on track at Mercedes F1 – revealed that his first role at Ferrari was to find a way to access McLaren's radio communication flow, which he succeeded, until 'An engineer named Tyler discovers it.
“My first work was that of radio spy.”
“The communication channel was not open like today. Teams like McLaren encrypt their radio. As it was the main competitor of Ferrari, my work was to find a way to intercept it.”
“It was undoubtedly morally prohibited. At the time, analog encryption was based on the automatic mixture of communication in a radio frequency sequence.”
-“One of McLaren's sponsors was a encryption company, and I knew they only used a limited combination of sequences.”
“So I built something that followed each combination. McLaren used the same for a whole weekend of running. It meant that I found it, I could track communication.”
“We did it for about two years before McLaren discovered it. We react to things on the track that we could not know otherwise. They had an engineer called Tyler.”
“He suspected that we listened to him and began to say sarcastically hello to my boss (Jean Todt) on the radio.”
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