When I was in my late teens, I had a next door neighbour who was not much older than me, but he was tied down by a wife and baby, and with a career that had about as much potential as a chocolate kettle. We'll call him Clive, because his parents did. Clive would brag about all his marvellous exploits to impress the kid, me.

Clive claimed that he'd done some work for a guy who refused to pay him. This slight had to be addressed so Clive devised a cunning plan: he poured some sugar on the ground by the guy's car directly under the petrol filler.

The guy came out of his house, saw the sugar, had the car towed to a garage and everything stripped down. More than cash, he suffered inconvenience, and there was no evidence that anyone had even touched his car. Clive had his revenge, or so he claimed.

That story was told me nearly fifty years ago yet recently I recalled it for some reason. I cannot comment on a story involving white powder near a Ferrari prior to Monaco, but I can comment on a story told to me in 1959.

Clive hadn't actually done it, the story was an Urban Myth. The one thing that Clive was too dim to realise was that his story did not have a proper punch line. The guy should somehow have learned that some sugar was spilled on the ground and there was no actual sabotage to the car. Unless Clive had got in the punch line, all he had done was to be an irritant, he had not actually achieved revenge.

The line of white powder prior to Monaco seems to have slipped into the background in what some people insist on calling Stepneygate. We now have claim and counter-claim.

I have nothing to say about any of the claims, save for one thing and that is that the rumourmill has not been turning. This is the first big story I have encountered where everything is quiet. A usually reliable source (we will call him 'Crompo', I cannot give his actual name) rightly says, 'The silence is deafening.'

I was at the F1 test at Silverstone last month, I did not get a whiff of Stepneygate. Then it was the Goodwood Festival of Speed, hundreds of journos, and nobody was talking about it. On 18th July I was at the Press Day for the Goodwood Revival and nobody had a clue.

Normally you will hear theories. Most of those theories will prove to be wrong, but even those will make some sort of sense, at the time. What puzzles me in this case is the absence of any theory, but maybe that it is because it is hard to detect a motive.

Angelo Santini and Mauro Iaccoca, former employees of Ferrari, both convicted of industrial espionage, had a clear financial motive in selling Ferrari data to Toyota Motorsport. Their (suspended) gaol sentences may weaken the defence of former senior employees of Toyota Motorsport accused of buying and using the data. It is possible to imagine a motive for them to buy such data even if one's speculation proves to be wide of the mark.

In the present instance it is hard to even imagine a motive, you cannot build a theory on metaphorical quicksand. The really odd thing about Stepneygate is that the grapevine is silent.

When Toyota Motorsport was implicated in the theft of Ferrari data, there was a raid, carried out by German police on the instigation of an Italian prosecuting magistrate. It was a criminal offence. Individuals have been found guilty of crimes, yet I am not aware that the FIA has felt any need to be involved.

With Stepneygate, all action so far has been civil action which has yet to be resolved. The FIA has moved in even though there has been no conclusion to on-going civil disputes while Nigel Stepney himself has threatened action against Ferrari which might involve criminal charges. I am confused, I can say no more.

Max Mosley will never acknowledge the part he has played in all recent F1 scandals. Under his influence, the FIA has made it impossible for a really bright young engineer make his mark. The last one to follow the path trodden by Colin Chapman, John Cooper and Eric Broadley, was Adrian Reynard.

Adrian built an FF1600 car for his own use in 1973. He was able to build a substantial business and enter any formula he liked. Today he could not do that, most formulae below F1 are controlled and it was Max who did that.

The result is that most engineers are now employees. There was a time when you had a handful of designers whose names were linked to their cars and the performance of those cars. At Brabham, there was Ron Tauranac and then Gordon Murray. Colin Chapman shouldered the reputation of Lotus and even though he cheated in many aspects of his life there was never a hint of Chapman cheating in motor racing. There was Eric Broadley at Lola and Patrick Head at Williams. There were names and reputations associated with cars.

Even twenty years ago, there were rarely more than two or three designers per Formula One team and many had built cars for themselves. At a conservative estimate, there are 2,500 people involved in F1 design today and hardly any of them began by building a special with which to go racing.

Instead of the dedicated few, we have thousands of engineers tied to a pay cheque, not to anything they can achieve as individuals. If only one in a hundred of them can have their loyalty swayed by a better package, that means that there are two dozen of them where, once, there were none.