He had a great point, this is the second race of the year...! You want to give team orders for one position? He wasn't that fast anyway, and if he was that fast he could have made it more obvious. At least Checo made it clear with Jense at times last year, which unnerved him quite a bit. Same thing here with Felipe.
Team orders so early in the season seem a little bit premature, and a good way to ruffle feathers with some drivers, I am sure. I can understand team orders late in the season if the title is at stake, or a top finish in the championship, but no sooner than that. But having said that, why couldn't Bottas catch and pass Massa since he had fresher tyres?
Bottas started 18th and DID catch Massa. I think he could have passed him. The problem is the two cars almost crashed earlier in the race and I don't think anyone wanted them to take chances. Therefore -- the message from the pits. They were both in the points and if they took each other out, that would not have been worth the risk. I think what you're looking at is that Williams knows it's advantage this early in the season will fade as the others get better. That's why the early points are so important to them.
Scoring points maybe wise from a business point of view, but preventing a driver to challenge his team mate is rather bad from a racing point of view. Reining in Bottas so early in the season may demotivate him, surely.
Yes maybe I'am not a fan of team orders for this reason, but I do fully understand why teams have them, mainly for the risk in crashing out your team mate, it is probably the last thing as a driver you ever would want to do, remember Webber v Vettel, and Button v Ham Canada I think..
Crashes do happen anyway, and team mates crashing into each other is not new. But not all duels end up in crashes. But I remember that in the past, Williams and McLaren allowed their drivers to race each others, and that provided terrific shows. I remember Lauda v. Prost, Prost v. Senna, Mansell v. Piquet and that took me to the edge of my seat then. Times have changed, surely ... Now the accountants have taken over. I can only imagine the reaction of the above-named if the team had intimated they had to surrender to their team mate at the ... second race of the season. Good job there were no radio onboard then!
Of course it does. Otherwise the spectators feel cheated. That's one thing I like in some series; team orders seem completely absent. Would I be right in saying that there are no team orders in NASCAR and IRL? I don't follow those closely.
You finally figured it out. F1 is a business. Nothing more and nothing less. It's a business in the guise of a sport.
