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Team principal's Maurizio Arrivabene and Christian Horner clashed in the post-Friday running press conference. The two disputed over the deal Ferrari made with former FIA Safety Chief and Deputy Race Director Laurent Mekies, who is leaving his role to join Ferrari.
Prior to the deal, teams had placed a 'gentleman's agreement' not to sign any personnel with internal info until a year after they left their post. The agreement came following Renault's controversial signing of Marcin Budkowski, who contains detailed information on the 2018 cars.
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Arrivabene defended Ferrari's actions, saying: "There is nothing wrong with that,” he said. “We were respecting absolutely local law, the Swiss local law, where Laurent was hired. Afterwards we went even further than that because we gave him six months of gardening leave.
"However, having said that, what we have discussed before is that we have signed a confidentiality agreement that means we are not allowed to discuss or share in public what we discuss there.
"Having said so, I heard comments related to a supposed or so-called ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ and I think they are comments because a ‘gentlemen’s agreement under labour law is illegal. I thought they were comments, just comments and no more than that."
But Horner retaliated, saying: "For me it is a big deal because the disappointing element about this is that we have a thing called the Strategy Group where the FIA, FOM and all team principals attend and we discussed the Marcin issue where there was great unrest about a key member of the FIA going to a team - in (this) case it was Renault.
"There was an understanding and a clear statement by the teams to say, right, let’s have a clear position that there should be at least a period of 12 months in the garden for a member of a team going from either FIA/FOM to a team or from a team to vice-versa."
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boudy
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No gentlemen in the room comment says it all. However lately the behaviour from Ferrari/Mercedes has been questionable. Not sure if F1 needs the likes of Ferrari or if Ferrari needs F1 more. If compared with other sports than F1 is bigger than Ferrari. If they would start their own series I woul... [Read more]