Formula 1 has been in the news for all the wrong reasons again this week, as Ferrari face the music for telling Felipe Massa to allow his team-mate Fernando Alonso through to victory at the German Grand Prix last weekend, contravening the rule banning so-called “team orders”. But more than that, the sport has been forced to do some soul-searching on the subject of team orders in general – should they be banned at all, especially since anyone in the know says that team orders still happen up and down the paddock, merely in different guises?
F1 already has credibility issues when it calls itself a sport – many people feel that, since the car is by far the biggest component in winning a race, the drivers are little more than overpaid jockeys. In many ways, they have a point: in qualifying this weekend in Hungary, the gap from the fastest qualifying lap to the slowest was just shy of 8 seconds; no more than 2 seconds of that was down to driver skill.
However, to many of us who are fans of the sport, the development race between the teams is as interesting and exciting as the race on the track. This is the side of the sport that is fought by geeks and nerds, people with degrees and PhD’s in science, physics, maths and engineering; and it is every bit as competitive and difficult as the race on the track.
No, I think the primary issue that Formula 1 faces for fans (as does motorsport in general) is conflict of interest. There are two championships running side by side, one for drivers, one for teams. However, there is a massive conflict of interest between the two. There is a big incentive for a driver to help the team in the constructors’ championship – the higher a team finishes, the more it can ask for sponsorship, the more money it has to spend on development, the better a car it has to give its drivers.
Equally, a team has a big interest in the drivers’ championship. Winning a world championship means a big inflow of cash from the driver’s sponsors, making it possible to develop more and hopefully win the championship again the following year.
Formula 1 has always had this issue, but it’s an issue that very few sports share. In individual sports (such as athletics or golf), obviously there is no team with which to have a conflict of interests. For team sports (such as soccer or rugby), there is no individual championship – win as a team, lose as a team, but there is no middle ground. (The only other sport I can think of where team orders do exist is cycling, but given the doping scandals, many probably consider cycling less of a sport than F1.)
As many people have pointed out (perhaps none more relevant than Michael Schumacher, who spoke at length and with great eloquence on the matter after the race), team orders frequently happen at the end of a season, and no one seems to mind. Kimi Raikkonen won his driver’s title in 2007 at the final race in Brazil because his then-team-mate Felipe Massa (again) let him through to win the race and clinch the title by a single point. At the time, despite the same rule on team orders being in place, no one batted an eyelid or thought this was wrong. On the contrary, had Massa kept the lead and allowed Hamilton to win the race by a single point, people would have (rightly) spoken of how selfish a decision it had been.
And this where we come to the crux of the problem. As both a team and an individual sport, F1 must have team orders. There is simply no way that they cannot exist as long as the sport remains structured as it is. (On a personal note, I find the talk of how the teams must find a better way to hide the team orders most insulting of all.) The issue that fans have is when team orders are employed when the driver stands to lose more than the team.
Massa and Alonso
In giving Alonso the race win, Ferrari gained 7 points for their highest ranked driver – less than the points gained from one sixth place finish, with a maximum of 200 points still up for grabs from 8 races. In taking the win from Massa, they robbed him of his first win since 2008, of his first triumph exactly a year to the day since he was almost killed by a piece of high-speed debris and of the rest of his 2010 championship. This last point is a big part of the issue – Felipe now knows that any time that Fernando is behind him, for the rest of the season at least, he will be expected to hand that place to his team-mate.
There are many more factors involved in this case, the fact that it would have been such an emotional victory for Massa not least among them. There is Alonso’s already strong reputation as a bad team-mate – he sold development secrets to Ferrari while at McLaren because he felt the team did not give him enough preference over a rookie Lewis Hamilton; the following year while at Renault, the team ordered rookie driver Nelson Piquet Jr to deliberately crash in order to aid Alonso’s race. There is also Ferrari’s notoriety for driver favouritism in the past – their order to Rubens Barrichello to allow Schumacher through to victory was the catalyst in the introduction of the current team orders ban. All of these things combined lead to a very bitter taste in the mouth.
The worst part for F1 is that there is no easy solution to implement. It is very difficult to draw up a rule that allows or bans team orders based on some sliding scale of perceived fairness, much less police and enforce it. With this in mind, the question must be: where does that leave F1?
Personally, I haven’t the slightest idea.
