Team orders once again…

It seems Ferrari have escaped further punishment for using banned team orders, so just the $100K fine and that’s it for being a little too blatant in manipulating the result of the race. No real surprise there.

Here is my original post and thoughts. To recap, Massa was told over the team radio: “Fernando is faster than you. Can you confirm you understand?”

The Brazilian responded by letting Alonso through in a move we can safely describe as “unsubtle”.

Immediately afterwards Massa’s race engineer added “Good lad. Just stick with it now. Sorry.”

The rules are clear; a team is not allowed to interfere with the race result. A couple of team principals were rather vocal about the damage to the sport’s credibility.

Ferrari principal Stefano Domenicali stated post-race that the team had only wanted to keep Massa aware of the latest race developments and that Ferrari didn’t give him explicit instructions to move over.

Explicit no, clear yes.

Domenicali continued “And because we have already seen in the past that certain situations could not give the best result for the team, that was the information that we wanted to give and we leave the drivers to understand and take notice of it in order to make sure that the team in terms of the result is the best,” he said.

The $100K fine was the maximum the stewards could give, any additional sanction (up to and including disqualification) would have to come from the World Motorsports Council (WMC).

The WMC met this morning and kept the slap on the wrist fine and imposed no further sanction. This was decided over the last few weeks in the politicking and back rooms deals that make F1 so interesting. Today was just a formality to close out the incident.

Generally I think the teams would like the ban on team orders to go away, they are almost impossible to police unless the team gets really dumb and flaunts them in the way Ferrari did in Germany. A little more subtlety and no one would be any the wiser.

Drivers work for the team; they are employees of Ferrari and will do what their employer tells them too. Ferrari wants to win races and championships. This put their top driver in the championship a better position.

Today Ferrari is 80 points behind Red Bull in the constructors’ championship. Alonso is 41 points behind Lewis Hamilton in the drivers’ race. Felipe Massa is a further 32 points further back and there are 25 points available for a win.

Piquet Jr put his Renault into the wall in Singapore a couple of years ago on team orders, selling a pass by a faster team mate should be laughably easy in comparison and Ferrari deserved the fine for lack of imagination in the execution.

Last word to Eddie Jordan “What Ferrari did was they showed no respect to the public, they treated us all like muppets, they broke the rule.”