Ferrari Chairman Luca Cordero di Montezemolo said on Tuesday that if the Italian Formula 1 team were to win the 2007 championship by default, it would be a deserved triumph.
The sport's governing body FIA is to look at new evidence in a spying controversy involving Ferrari and McLaren in Paris on Thursday. Some observers believe the British team could be disqualified from this year's championship for cheating.
If McLaren are ejected on Thursday, Ferrari stands to win both the drivers' and constructors' championships - a result which Montezemolo said would bring no shame.
"If we won the world championship by default it would still be a deserved victory," he said in Frankfurt where he was presenting a new Ferrari road model.
"If this happened, it would mean that the apparent winner had acted in an unfair way".
Ferrari is currently second to McLaren in the constructors' championship and its drivers are third and fourth behind McLaren's drivers in the individual championship.
The Ferrari boss was unwilling to speak at length on the spying scandal, saying the whole business was damaging to Formula 1 and the less said the better.
"The best thing is if this business is ended quickly and with the truth," he said.
In an on-line survey carried out by Italy's Sky TG24 television network, some 73% of the people responding said McLaren should be thrown out of this year's world championship. The remainder said it should be given a points penalty.
The survey had no statistical validity because respondents were not selected but it underlined how deep feelings run in Italy over the perceived injustice to Ferrari.
McLaren and Ferrari have been engaged in an off-the-track struggle for much of the season because of a 780-page dossier of Ferrari information found in the hands of McLaren's suspended chief designer Mike Coughlan.
The FIA shocked the Italian team in July by saying it could not punish McLaren for unauthorised possession of Ferrari information because there was no evidence the material had been used to gain an advantage in the championship.
NEW EVIDENCE.
But FIA reportedly now has copies of e-mails received by McLaren drivers Fernando Alonso and Pedro De La Rosa in which the leaked Ferrari information is mentioned. According to some reports, the emails reveal that the data was used to make changes to McLaren's racing cars.
In the midst of the controversy off the track, McLaren underlined its supremacy on it on Sunday, by notching up an impressive one-two victory in the Italian Grand Prix. Ferrari's Kimi Raikkonen came third while Felipe Massa had to retire with mechanical problems.
Montezemolo admitted that the defeat at Ferrari's home track had hurt. "We can't keep missing opportunities because of poor reliability. It's happened too often this year," he said.
