F1 Fanatic

http://www.autosport.com/features/article.php/id/3151

But they explicitly state that they think team orders ‘are a natural part of racing” and that “Far from attacking Ferrari, we fully support its actions in doing what it did in South Korea.”

They also claim “that the information that Massa was slowed came from inside the Ferrari team.” and that “For the purposes of clarity, at no stage did we accuse Ferrari of team orders in so doing, even if the action could be interpreted as such.”

My impression is that its a ‘damage control article’ so to speak, in response to all the flack they have been receiving about the original article.

And of course i would suggest reading the whole article as i’ve just copied and pasted bits of it here, which no doubt changed the context just a little bit lol

Information came from inside Ferrari?

1) Massa’s camp are leaking it to devalue Alonso because the Brazilian fans turned against him. “Alonso’s only winning because of our boy Massa, you know.”

2) Alonso’s camp are leaking it to make Massa look even worse before his home race. “I’m much cleverer than the rest of them and you’ll have to get used to him being no.2″

Waaa waaa anti-Ferrari conspiracy.

There’s nothing to suggest he’s criticising Ferrari, quite the reverse in fact. It was the original article on grandprix.com which suggested that, which quoted Mark Hughes but wasn’t written by him or anyone at Autosport.

I’d go with Hairs’ theory as to why the leak came out.

But they explicitly state that they think team orders ‘are a natural part of racing” and that “Far from attacking Ferrari, we fully support its actions in doing what it did in South Korea.”

If this is true, then it shouldn’t be supported at all. I might not agree with what Ferrari did in Germany, but I can understand why they did it, and they only manipulated their own race. But as soon as they start impinging on someone ele’s race – like this article claims – they should be brought into account. Deliberately blocking is not cool. We have it in the V8 Supercars a few years ago when the Holdens kept holding Craig Lowndes up so that Rick Kelly could overtake him and there was a lot of controversy over it. If Ferrari are ruining someone else’s race for the sake of their own, they should be disqualified.

And I’m not saying that because I on’t like Ferrari. I’d be singing exactly the same tune if Red Bull or McLaren or Mercedes or anyone else did it.

I’m not sure what you mean Eggry.

The original grandprix.com article used Hughes’ report to say that Ferrari had used Massa to slow down Schumacher to prevent Alonso from losing not just one but more places because of his pit stop.

What Hughes is saying is that Massa was slowed down because Alonso had a bad pit-stop and that he was told this by someone inside Ferrari. He doesn’t care about igniting a team order row because to him they’re irrelevant, as he supports team orders.

Hughes never quoted the grandprix.com article. They quoted him. So he couldn’t have done it create a conspiracy, because he couldn’t have done it for any reason as he didn’t do it at all.

The one thing that bothers me is that he hasn’t specifically denied that he said Ferrari used Massa to slow Schumacher down. I don’t buy Autosport so I don’t know if he said that. But he doesn’t say they did in this rebuttal article, so I guess not?

It also happened in Hungary, when Massa slowed in the pit entry to avoid queuing behind Alonso at the SC.

Even if it wasn’t a team order, slowing in the pit entry was explicitly made illegal after Spa 2005 when McLaren did it.

Also, I would need to look at the footage again, but you could probably argue that doing that partly led to all the chaos in pitlane with Kubica/Sutil and Rosberg.

As recently as 2005, both Renault and McLaren did it in their respective title campaigns, and barely anyone made a fuss about it.

Didn’t Fisichella got a penalty for it once?

FWAAC!!!… Ferrari Win At All Costs…
MASSA – Must Assist Superior Stablemate Always.
Alonso Motto – Help the team: Help me!

To be fair though, Alonso has almost always been the better driver in his teams, except for some chap called Hamilton.

( slightly off topic, sorry :D )