Put the words “team” and “orders” together in connection with Formula One and you are bound to create a stir. People get very animated — witness Eddie Jordan last week at Hockenheim — because team orders are against the rules, but inside the gated community of the F1 paddock you will find few who think they should be.
Grand prix racing has always been a team sport and both Fernando Alonso and Felipe Massa were at pains to point out that the result they achieved in the German grand prix was what was best for Ferrari, the team which employs them and pays their considerable wages. It is hard to argue.
The seven extra points Alonso gained by winning the race pushed him deeper into the fight for the world championship. Massa is not part of that scrap and the call that Ferrari made was the right one for its world championship chances. It’s how Ferrari did it that has caused the upset.
The order to Massa should not have come from his race engineer, Rob Smedley, but from the team principal, Stefano Domenicali. Smedley and Massa have a closer relationship than most and it was the Teessider’s tone of voice and subsequent apology that really let the cat out of the bag.
What teams have to avoid is a repeat of what happened at the A1 Ring in 2002.
That day in Austria Rubens Barrichello led Michael Schumacher for lap after lap only to move aside and slow down yards from the line under orders from Ferrari to let his teammate win.
Such was their dominance that year Schumacher and Barrichello were the only drivers in with a sniff of the title, but when the chequered flag waved it was clear the Brazilian was not in the reckoning at all. Spectators and TV viewers who thought they had seen a race realised they had instead witnessed a display of formation flying with a twist. It was a sham.
Nonetheless, at the sharp end of the grid, teams race to win championships and it was ever thus. In his two seasons with Mercedes in the 1950s Juan Manuel Fangio was so dominant his team could apparently employ orders on commercial grounds.
Only twice was the great Argentinian beaten by a teammate, first in the non-championship Berlin grand prix at Avus, when he was pipped at the line by his German teammate Karl Kling, and then in the 1955 British grand prix at Aintree, when he followed the young Stirling Moss over the line.
A home win does wonders for car sales and Moss asked Fangio if he had been ordered to let his teammate win. “No, it was your day,” Fangio said. To this day Moss doesn’t know whether Fangio was being economical with the truth.
Last Sunday’s episode looked bad because Massa, a year to the day after his life-threatening accident in Hungary, slowed so obviously to let Alonso past.
The Brazilian has been short of confidence this year and a victory would have done him a power of good, so no wonder he was grumpy at having to give way, but it was the right thing to do for Alonso’s title challenge.
If we get to Abu Dhabi in November with Lewis Hamilton needing a second-place finish to clinch the world championship but running third while Jenson Button — out of title contention in this hypothetical scenario — leads, what do you think Martin Whitmarsh will do on the McLaren pit wall? What would you do? — Guardian News & Media 2010