Dennis refuses punishment

The team were on the receiving end of the penalty at a hearing in front of the FIA World Motorsport Council in Paris.

But Dennis, who has run the team since 1981, believes the penalty was unacceptable.

"The most important thing is that we will be going motor racing this weekend, the rest of the season and every season," said Dennis.

"This means that our drivers can continue to compete for the World Championship. However having been at the hearing today I do not accept that we deserved to be penalised in this way.

McLaren were hauled in front of motorsport's governing body and instructed to prove that they did not use technical secrets leaked by Ferrari's former technical manager Nigel Stepney to suspended chief designer Mike Coughlan.

Dennis believes the evidence presented, primarily emails between their drivers and one to Coughlan, illustrated that this was the case.

"Today's evidence given to the FIA by our drivers, engineers and staff clearly demonstrated that we did not use any leaked information to gain a competitive advantage," he added.

"Much has been made in the press and at the hearing today of emails and text messages to and from our drivers. The World Motorsport Council received statements from Fernando Alonso, Lewis Hamilton and Pedro de la Rosa stating categorically that no Ferrari information had been used by McLaren and that they had not passed any confidential data to the team."

"The entire engineering team in excess of 140 people provided statements to the FIA affirming that they had never received or used the Ferrari information."

"We have never denied that the information from Ferrari was in the personal possession of one of our employees at his home. The issue is: was this information used by McLaren? This is not the case and has not been proven today."

"We are also continually asked if McLaren didn't use the information, what was the reason for Stepney and Coughlan collecting all this data about Ferrari? We can only speculate as neither Coughlan nor Stepney gave evidence at today's hearing, but we do know that they were both seeking employment with other teams, as already confirmed by both Honda and Toyota."

One further levy put in place by the FIA is that McLaren's car for 2008 will have to undergo a stringent examination to ensure none of Ferrari's intellectual property is present in it's design before it is allowed to race.

But Dennis insisted that this would not affect the team in the slightest.

"There will be no issue for the 2008 season as we have not at any stage used any intellectual property of any other team," he added.

"We have got the best drivers and the best car and we intend to win the World Championship."

The team's chief operations officer Martin Whitmarsh said that the team would wait before deciding whether or not to appeal.

"We believes we have grounds for an appeal," said Whitmarsh. "We will though wait to find out the findings of FIA, which will be out tomorrow."