To spot the occasions where teams have influenced race outcomes in the past 12 months you don’t need to be a cynic – just a realist.
Ferrari shuffled Felipe Massa out of Kimi Raikkonen’s path at Interlagos last year to deliver the drivers’ championship to his team mate; Nick Heidfeld presented Robert Kubica with no resistance at Montreal this year, allowing Kubica to score the team’s maiden victory; Heikki Kovalainen refrained from racing Lewis Hamilton at Hockenheim in the closing stages.
A brutally tough interpretation of article 39.1 could brand any of these decisions as interference with a race result.
But, as we discussed a few weeks ago, unwritten rules play just as big a role in how F1 works. In the case of team orders, teams can get away with a lot of things you might expect Article 39.1 to prevent. They would have to be quite blatant to get caught and punished.
Why did the stewards leave McLaren, Ferrari and BMW alone in these examples? Probably because there was no radio communication between team and driver beforehand giving an instruction, as we heard at Austria in 2002 (“Let Michael past for the championship, Rubens, please” – Jean Todt.) Presumably the teams now tell their drivers beforehand what is expected of them in these situations.
At Interlagos last year, Massa was out of the championship running and was surely told by the team before the race that if he could guarantee the championship for Raikkonen by moving aside he must do it. In the event, with a comfortable one-two, Ferrari were able to take the most low-profile way of pulling the old switcheroo – doing it via the pit stops.
Similarly it makes sense for teams not to allow their drivers to hold each other up when the following car is much faster than the leading one – as was the case for BMW and McLaren this year in the other examples above.
