Jean Todt may have been seen as the chief protagonist in the ongoing Formula One espionage row, but he is taking personal comfort from the fact that Ferrari apparently racked up enough points in the final few rounds of the season to claim the constructors crown on merit.

Whilst revealing, for the first time, just how he has been affected by the spy scandal, the diminutive Frenchman admitted that he was relieved that Ferrari had done enough to avoid accusations that the Scuderia had only won the teams' title because the FIA excluded McLaren. However, his mathematics skills appear to fall short of his ability to run an F1 team.

"To be very sincere, I was counting the points," Todt told Ferrari's website, "I knew we had won, but I knew that it would always be said that we had won only because of the FIA's decision, not because of the sporting results. So I will say it is better now that it has been done normally."

Unfortunately for Todt, adding Kimi Raikkonen's 110 points to Felipe Massa's 94 sees Ferrari fall some 14 points short of matching McLaren's theoretical tally of 218.

And, as for the spy scandal, Todt admitted that he still had a sour taste in his mouth, despite all judgements appearing to go Ferrari's way.

"I could never expect that something like that could happen," he insisted, "I am very bitter about this unnecessary story, where our main competitor did not have the vision to stop when they could have stopped it. So that is why we had to fight against that.

"In a way, we are still fighting against it outside the sporting world, but that is something I could not expect. I did not know that it could exist, but sometimes maybe you learn things. Maybe you are a bit naïve on certain things, but we had to move along on the sporting situation. And to move along was to try to win races and, possibly, to be first and second. But we always kept the two things separate."