Head Or Heart?

Mercedes, AGP. (C)

    A message comes over the radio, "David, you're seriously compromising your position at McLaren." If you remember that, you'd remember the 1998 Australian F1 Grand Prix, where McLaren driver David Coulthard had to honour a pre-race agreement and cede his place to team mate Mika Hakkinen. Not only was DC reluctant to comply, perhaps you remember Ferrari driver Rubens Barrichello also reluctantly waiting to the absolute last possible moment to allow championship aspirant and team mate Michael Schumacher to pass and win the 2002 Austrian Grand Prix.
    That's right. The contentious issue of team orders in Formula One has raised its head again with a rather sheepish Mercedes driver Lewis Hamilton claiming the spoils at last weekend's Russian GP after team mate Valtteri Bottas was instructed while leading the race to allow Hamilton to pass.
   Team orders in F1 are nothing new. They've been around since the series inception. For example, at the 1956 Italian GP, Peter Collins famously handed his Ferrari over to Juan Manuel Fangio. In those days team mates even shared cars if one expired.   
    Don't forget, F1 is a team sport and therefore you win and lose as a team. Obviously the desire is to win both the driver's and constructor's championships. Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff stated after winning the Russian GP that team orders are something that he is not particularly fond of, but he has an obligation to the hundreds of employees at Mercedes F1 to deliver the best possible result for the team. Now Mercedes have a 2-race points buffer to Ferrari in the driver's championship. Imagine the explaining he would have to do to the Mercedes board of directors if he didn't implement team orders and Hamilton lost the championship by a few meagre points?
    Is there something that the teams have glaringly neglected to consider though? The fans! The 2002 Austrian GP orchestration by Ferrari was met with mass "booing" from the fans accompanied with the universal sign of disapproval, thumbs down. Recognising the unsavoury taste this left in the fans mouth, the governing body tried outlawing team orders between 2003 and 2011. Teams easily found a way around this though. A slow pitstop here, a fumbled wheelnut there. Or a cryptic radio message like "Fernando is faster than you", which was delivered to Ferrari's Felipe Massa at Hockenheim in 2010.
    With the diminishing number of viewers globally watching F1, wouldn't the casual punter be more inclined to shell out their hard earned for Pay TV if they knew that the racing was pure and simply the best driver won on the day? The championship would consequentially take care of itself. Can you imagine how high the level of self satisfaction the team that won would have? Can you also imagine the number of fans that team would acquire knowing that they abandoned team orders, let their drivers race from the start of the season til the end, and still won the championship?

    
    

---