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I elaborated already way too often that the FIA misuses its power to influence the game and that in the past in has done so favouring Williams and McLaren and Ferrari at different points in time, and not only Ferrari.
What Gt-R says about the spying is correct, but this is done in an almost intelligence-like professional way by the three big teams and so gradually decreasing in effort and professionalism to Arrows sketchboy and Minardi's polaroid. For the big ones it's fairly easy to get their competitors creations as data in their designing software just from series of photographs taken under different angles. They would be able to make exact external copies of each others cars if they wanted to and even the information they can gather from the internals is very far stretching. And ofcourse this information is used to their own advantage, either by perceiving it rightfully and using it themselves, or by not getting it or not wanting to take the risk and report it - or have it reported by someone more influantial - to the FIA. BAR for instance copied Williams undertray last year, but didn't dare to design their chassis around it as opposed to Williams who designed their 2001 chassis in such a way that could maximize the advantage. In fact BAR decided it was doing Williams more favours than them and they decided it was better if they could get WIlliams to drop the whole thing. They went to see Ross Brawn and just dropped the matter in some chit-chat conversation and Ross eagerly went - as BAR expected - to see Charlie Whiting and made sure it was banned.
As for the beryllium thing. It's only hazardous in small particles, i.e. powder form, and that was the reason it was banned from it's use as brake callipers, for which it was perfectly suitable because of it's extraordinary thermodynamic characteristics, from 1998 onwards. The claim that it would be hazardous from crashing cars and therefore ban it's use in cylinderliners for instance, was pretty far stretched and was indeed more of a performance brake on Mercedes. But things like that happen all the time all around the field, all around the season.
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