No place for team orders

Felipe Massa: denied victory at Hockenheim, one year on from his life-threatening
accident in Hungary.

After being penalised for blocking Ferrari's Felipe Massa in qualifying at the 2006 Italian Grand Prix, an outraged Fernando Alonso famously declared, “I don’t consider F1 anymore a sport.” Four years on, the tables have turned. Racing for the Scuderia and - in a strange twist of fortune - with Massa in the sister car, it is now the Spaniard himself, along with the rest of the Ferrari team, who stands accused of unsporting behaviour.

No one who watched the race in Hockenheim can have any doubt that team orders were issued to Massa to allow Alonso to pass him for the victory. What's surprising is how many people have come out defending Ferrari's actions, arguing that Formula One is and always has been a 'team sport'. Nothing could be further from the truth. If that were the case, what would be the point of having both Drivers' and Constructors' Championships? Moreover, unlike genuine team sports such as football, rugby or cricket, in motorsport team-mates are also rivals on the field of play.

The "no team orders" rule - officially speaking, Article 39.1 of the FIA's Sporting Regulations - exists to protect the integrity of the sport as a fair contest, which after all is what fans pay to watch - not a carefully choreographed procession. They are right to feel cheated by what took place on Sunday, just as they were when details of the so-called 'Crashgate' scandal became public last year. What's the point of tuning in to support our favourite drivers, if, after an hour and a half of driving, the result turns out to have been a fix?

An insult to the sport

Ferrari's move was both cynical and unsporting. While it may have marginally benefitted Alonso's position in the drivers' standings, they have inflicted upon themselves the worst PR disaster since that day at the A-1 Ring in May 2002. And it was so all unnecessary. Instead of having to defend the team's actions in a heated press room, Stefano Domenicali could so easily have been praising Massa's brilliant return to form - his first victory since the injury he suffered in Hungary a year to the day earlier. Yet somehow Ferrari managed to turn what should have been an inspirational story into a farce, in the process damaging not just their own image but that of F1 as a whole.

Worst of all, the incident demonstrated the Scuderia's complete lack of respect for F1's many followers - including its own fans. Attempting to covering their tracks - getting Massa to declare that letting Alonso past was his own idea - only further insulted viewers' intelligence, as did Domenicali's belated podium photocall that the Brazilian clearly wanted no part of. The truth of the matter was clear to anyone who heard Rob Smedley's radio transmissions - including the telling apology after the pass - or who witnessed Massa's terse responses in the post-race press conference.

The $100,000 fine issued by the stewards at Hockenheim is but a gesture; far more important will be deliberations of the FIA's World Motor Sport Council (WMSC) when it meets in September. For the sake of the sport it needs to come down heavily upon Ferrari, either in the form of disqualification from the German Grand Prix or a temporary suspension from the championship.

Whether it will in fact impose so drastic a penalty is, unfortunately, rather more doubtful. After all, it failed to do so in Renault's case over last year's so-called 'Crashgate' saga, which was an even more serious affair since it endangered other competitors as well as spectators. More likely Ferrari will escape without further penalty, especially since the FIA presidency is now held by Jean Todt, who was team principal at Ferrari when it engineered the Barrichello/Schumacher switch back in 2002.

The spirit of the game

Team orders undermine the very nature of Formula One as a sporting contest, and moves need to be taken to try to police them as soon as possible. A simple solution would be to outlaw all non-telemetric radio contact between the car and the pit wall. In what other sport are the competitors allowed such a degree of contact with their coaching staff during a match? 

One recalls the one-field radios that were trialled by the South African cricket team during the 1999 World Cup, which were swiftly banned by the International Cricket Council (ICC), having been judged as being against the spirit of the game. In the same way, banning radio contact in F1 - or at least limiting it to driver-to-pit only - would encourage the drivers to think and act more independently while they are on track, and help to promote individual competition. The garage is the place for the team, but in the cockpit it should be the driver and the driver alone who makes the calls.

In the meantime the only way to stop similar acts from occurring again is for the WMSC to take a hard line against Ferrari. No team or driver should ever be allowed to bring the sport into disrepute and go unpunished. Only time will tell what the FIA decides, but for now everyone involved in F1 should be asking themselves the question: whatever happened to the spirit of Formula One?

Photo reproduced under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 licence from an image uploaded to Flickr by f1photos.org.