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We're just mad because not even one goddamn team could challenge the bloody Mercs and of course, Merc are not going to provide us the entertainment we crave. They're going to do everything to win more of those delicious world championships in the most boring way possible.

IMO they should stop thinking on F1 as everything but sport, if you have a shitload of points ahead and driving the finest, why not keeping the results as it were instead of farcical changes because an austrian dumbfuck called it

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Motorsports trend for 2024: everything is a bad taste joke now

I blame Vettel for the team orders (I'm half-joking here, so bear with me). Had he kept Hamilton behind one or two laps, he could've held in between the Mercs as the 3 of them had very similar pace. Bottas win, closer championship, everyone would've been happy. But no, Vettel had to release Lewis too early and leave a gap open in turn 4.

And yeah, no matter how much logical/rational sense team orders make, it was fucking disgusting today, especially after all the good support work Bottas has been doing so far. It's ridiculous, inhumane, disrespectful and stop (I mean you guys here as Formula 1 fans) trying to rationalize it for the sake of championship points. Fuck you, Toto, fuck you.

If Bottas doesn't like it, he can quit and hand the seat over to Ocon. He's not getting a better shot at winning a GP than Mercedes because no other top team will ever take him. It's sit down and shut up deal.

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Well, no, not really. Bottas knows the contract he's signing. Ultimately, if you don't want to be have to be moving over for your team mate in the last few races of a season, you need to get yourself in that title fight, and bad luck or not, Bottas isn't in it because he hasn't performed well enough over the course of the year. It would be the same for every other driver on the grid - Lewis would have no choice but to do the same if it was Bottas in the title fight

I don't understand why we shouldn't rationalise it - these manufacturers aren't investing eleventy hundred million dollars a season just for the whole campaign to be pissed up the wall by letting their slow guy take points off their fast guy

Because I don't care about their money and their feelings and their financial interests. I watch a sport.

And the championship is run race by race. In Russia, the fast guy was Bottas. He wasn't stealing any of Hamilton points, their were HIS points. Fair and square. He's running for second position in the championship too.

Fair enough if something happened in the race that caused Hamilton to be behind (ala Hakkinen COulthard 1998 Australia), but here it's just nuts that you even consider that Hamilton has any rights to these points, or that fans should even remotely be ok with any of this.

It's not about having rights. No one has a right to any result in F1, unless they cross the line first without breaking the rules. It's about doing what's best for the team. That's the way it's been since we first had teams in motorsport and they were competing for something. The drivers' championship is a team championship just as much as the constructors', and there's never been a time in F1 history where that hasn't been the case. The only times team orders have not come into play in title fights is when there are two drivers from the same team involved

But you're watching a sport in which team orders are inherent and always have been. The teams don't care about entertainment, their only job is to do everything they can to win within a certain set of rules - it's the series organisers job to come up with a set of rules which make an entertaining product. If you don't like team orders (which is fair enough), you should be directing your anger towards the circumstances that allow them to happen, not the teams themselves.

You cannot lump all team instructions in the same "team orders" box. They make sense in a lot of situations, but they also range from ugly-as-fuck (Austria 2002) to fair (Australia 1998) on my "fuck you Ferrari" official team-order scale.
People were pissed off at Schumacher-Barrichello for a reason. Heck guys, you're justifying today's actions the same way Todt did back then (paraphrased: "we lost too many championships in the last race for a few points to afford taking any risks even if we're dominating and only a third way into the season"). Is logic and money on his side? yes! Does it make him sound like less of a dick and a coward to me? No!

Today's team order was neither at a critical point of the race (or the championship), nor classy in its execution. It's closer to "ugly-as-fuck" than to "fair" on my scale.

And if you think that teams aren't here for entertaining the fans, you're right. They don't think they're in that business either. We will see where this will take the series (and you already see where it has taken it already - history be damned)

I dunno man, if Mercedes were like that, they'd have never let Nico and Lewis race from 2014-2016 when they had the title to themselves and just do what Citroen did in their time in the WTCC and script the race and who was to win at every race until they won the title.

And They're racing a team that also aren't shy about building a whole team around 1 driver, so they'd be stupid to let Bottas and Hamilton take points off each other until the title is done

As soon as Lewis wins the title I expect he'll be moving over for Bottas at a race in Brazil or Abu Dhabi or somewhere to make up for it. He certainly wasn't happy about it, bottas wasn't happy about it, the team wasn't happy about it, but sometimes in life you have to make the big decisions.

Annoyingly, we're now talking about that instead of his brilliant move on Vettel after the pit stops.
I'd much rather focus on overtaking but that's never the agenda on F1, for some reason...

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if I was FIA I would park both Mercedes for Japan and if they whined about I'd make 2 as an example to stop shitting on fan's faces

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Motorsports trend for 2024: everything is a bad taste joke now

A move completed following a borderline acceptable defensive move by Vettel as well.

And we’re also ignoring Max slicing his way through the field and leading comfortably for a very long time with a tyre than was supposed to fall off a cliff after 6 laps.

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Yeah, I think with better direction that race could've been....ok?

Late on in the race Grosjean passed Hulkenberg for 11th and there were a couple of other passes you could only see via the timing screen too.
And we only saw Vandoorne squeeze around the outside of Sainz at T1 on the last lap because Vettel happened to be lapping them at the time, so the director obviously had no will to present this as even a semi-exciting race...

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The Vandoorne overtake was a good piece of opportunism.

But while we’re talking about relevant pieces of action during race we’re ignoring the main theme of the post race, which is that we should be outraged at a team decision which they feel is crucial to their potential success, which both drivers handled with grace and dignity, which has been part of this sport since it’s inception.

Outrage seems to be a prerequisite for every race now... for example...

Silverstone - Hamilton skipping the part ferme interview and not acknowledging Raikkonen in the cool down room

Hockenheim - Hamilton going into then not taking to the pit lane

Hungaroring - Bottas attempt to re-overtake Vettel late in the race

Monza - Mercedes fantom pitstop and Bottas’ spoiler tactics holding up Kimi

Singapore - Perez’ moments with Ocon and Sirotkin

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Formula Fun Cup Champion 2013
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Well, it's easy engagement, isn't it? Controversy gets the discussion going in the studio and on social media. That's just how sports coverage works these days. There's no room for a Murray Walker type any more - a media pundit who's nice to everyone. Just look at the treatment David Croft gets for the same thing

It's funny, after years of saying F1 coverage in Britain was rubbish because it wasn't extensive enough, these days I feel like we've got too much. I get what Sky are trying to do - they're trying to turn a race into a whole major event on its own. But tbh there's something quite special about tuning into a mid-90s F1 race, seeing about 15 minutes of world feed with Murray talking over it, a 2-hour race, about 10 minutes of Murray talking over the podium, and that's it, back to Grandstand. Back then you got little snippets and had to make the effort to find out more, and that must have been a lot more satisfying than all of this

Easy is one way of putting it, lazy is far more accurate. When engaging using outrage, facts are ignored and irrelevant. Opinion and emotion is the go to and false equivalency is used as ammo.

It’s pretty funny to see it happening and it’s pretty rampant in these last pages.

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Just going to throw in that Coldtyre is 100% right and it's depressing how many people here justify team orders in F1 "because traditions" as if F1 couldn't survive and be far better without them, and as if there aren't plenty other forms of Motorsport that don't have team orders (and somehow don't even have to make a rule against them).

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Well probably because it was opportunistic, but I don't know about brilliant...that seems like bit of a stretch. Mainly because Seb even admitted that he was compromised coming out of T2 (after his marginal but ultimately legal block) and then admitted to leaving the door open for Lewis due to not knowing where exactly he was positioned and didn't want to risk contact for them both. Personally for me, Leclerc's move was the one of the race.

Genuine question - which other series work in the same way as F1 (ie. team cars are funded entirely by the same people with exactly the same sponsors), and don't have team orders?

Yeah pretty much. If Bottas was consistently quicker and able to keep his nose in the championship fight, like Rosberg did, then it would've been a different story. Or he could've always tried what Vettel did in China 2014 and responded back on the radio with: "Tough luck".

Kidding aside, as a Ferrari fan, if the situation was reversed I would've been okay with them doing the same as much as it would've robbed us of a feel good story in Raikkonen wining. Mercedes executed this as best as they could given the situation. At this stage of the championship, no matter the points lead on paper, you have to look at this more clinically rather than emotionally when you're a corporate outfit at the sharp end of the grid and do the needful to maximize your success.