F1 spy games revealed as team bosses make incredible admissions

A woman looks through a pair of binoculars to the background of F1 cars — Photo: © IMAGO

F1 News & Gossip

F1 spy games revealed as team bosses make incredible admissions

Spy photographers? We've heard it all now

Kerry Violet F1 News Editor

F1 editor and journalist covering motorsport since 2024.

Thursday 4 June 2026 08:59

Former F1 team principal Otmar Szafnauer and leading engineer Rob Smedley have admitted to using spy photographers in the paddock.

The F1 pit lane can be a hectic place, especially during a grand prix Sunday, but did you know that the photographers you may see skulking around the paddock on TV aren't just there to snap shots of celebrities?

In fact, they are up to much more secretive work, often employed by more than one team to get as many pictures as possible of rival machinery to take back to the factory and influence development.

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Szafnauer previously led Alpine as F1 team principal and prior to that, was COO and boss of Force India, even as the team transitioned to Racing Point and Aston Martin.

His time at the helm of Racing Point was most memorable due to the infamous 'pink Mercedes' saga, where fans and Racing Point's rivals assigned the apt nickname to their 2020 challenger, the RP20, due to its aerodynamic design being scarily similar to the 2019 championship-winning Mercedes W10.

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F1 bosses admit hiring spy photographers

In a recent episode of the High Performance Racing podcast, Szafnauer, ex-race engineer Rob Smedley and co-host Jake Humphrey discussed the pink Mercedes, naturally leading to conversations around spying on rivals in F1.

Szafnauer opened up on the 'totally legal' process of using photographers to copy designs from Mercedes, saying: "That's what we did. Totally legal. We took pictures of the Mercedes and copied it from the pictures."

Humphrey took the opportunity to tease the former F1 team principal over the matter, causing Szafnauer to look to Smedley, who previously worked as a race engineer for Ferrari and led trackside operations at Williams.

Asked by Szafnauer how many spy photographers Ferrari had during his time at the Scuderia, Smedley replied: "Depends on the race, but yeah. Couple. Everybody's got spy."

Lifting the lid on the practice, Szafnauer continued: "We used to have a spy photographer and a non-spy photographer… I remember sharing a spy photographer when I was at Force India."

This was a memory Smedley shared, with Felipe Massa's ex-engineer adding: "Yeah, I was going to say that. There was spy photographers who shared. They shared between teams."

McLaren legend called time on F1 spies

Szafnauer then delved deeper into the practice, revealing that Force India shared spy photographers with McLaren until Ron Dennis came back into the frame.

“The reason we did it was because at Force India, we're low budget. So, we shared with McLaren and then Ron Dennis came back and he put a stop to it and I said, 'Ron, what? It just makes sense for us to share. You know, we share the cost and the photographer has plenty of capacity to take the list of stuff we want and the list of stuff you want and take the pictures.'

"And he said, ‘No, I don't even want you to know what we're looking for…he said to me, 'It's like you being lost in a forest and I hand you a compass. I'm not handing you the compass.’ That's how competitive he was.

“So, we had to stop…well, he stopped us. So, then I had to pay the whole thing.”

"The spy photographer can sit there all day. He's got a list of stuff that he needs to take pictures of. He can stand there all day until the opportunity arises and then he snaps it."

F1 Otmar Szafnauer