F1 - Team-orders-gate

[Earl Grey]

Lot of fuss over ickle Lewis Hamilton being given a leg up by swapping him and Bottas to better enable the drivers Championship to go to the Mercedes team (the constructors title is not affected). Whether it's true that Bottas could defend against Vettel better than Hamilton because his tyres were in a less shabby state I'm not sure.
When Vettel was given a similar leg up and Raikkonen eventually gave up his position with a little bit of teasing of the Ferrari orders (he wanted them to state it very clearly rather than make a pretence they were doing it because of 'different strategies') then it didn't cause too many ripples apart from the way Kimi deliberately misunderstood them.
https://www.reddit.com/r/formula1/comme ... ttel_past/
Other teams have done it.....Ocon and Perez were swapped to see if Perez could make better headway and when he couldn't, they swapped back but no real fuss made over it.
All I hope is that Hamilton gets the Championship with substantially more points in hand than the difference these Russian GP team orders made or he'll never live it down!

[pompeygunner]

He'll live it down EG. He is a brilliant driver in a car that isn't as good as the ferrari's. One of the greats imho.
You win the F1 title then you deserve it.

[The Cincinnati Kid]

Yeah....here's the thing though...its detrimental to the sport.
I mean, if I paid to go to a car race I want to see a car race where the best driver on the day wins. If Hamilton comes in 2nd or 3rd, well, that's how he and his car performed on that day.
I get its a team sport but you aint going to win fans and pundits by fixing the winner of a race.