Team orders row revives age-old F1 debate

Formula One is back on notoriously familiar territory just when teams seemed to be making a real effort to put the fans and the sport before their own private interests.

Viewers around the world, many outraged by what they had seen in Sunday's German Grand Prix, will have woken up on Monday to sports pages filled with tales of fraud, cheating and a Ferrari 'fix'.

"Ferrari pull fast one. Outrage but no surprise as F1 hits a new low," declared one typical headline in Britain's Daily Mail above a report from Hockenheim.

That is a moot point, given that the previous lows include last year's revelation that Renault's Brazilian, Nelson Piquet, had been ordered to crash deliberately into a wall in Singapore in 2008 to help team mate Fernando Alonso win the race.

This season, unlike recent ones, has been remarkably free of intrigue and paddock politics, with the emphasis on some thrilling racing.

Until Sunday, that is, when Ferrari was fined $100,000 and left facing possibly more serious punishment for using banned 'team orders' in telling Brazilian Felipe Massa to let Alonso win.

The 'team orders' furore has revived a debate about the very soul of the sport.

Cynics might argue that the soul is neither pure nor particularly easy to locate, given that the billion-dollar series is increasingly determined to leave its geographical origins behind for new circuits in unfamiliar locations.

The problem is the old conundrum over whether Formula One is primarily about the teams or drivers, entertainment or business.

It is both, of course, but there are those -- usually the people who pay the bills -- who have long argued that the teams and their commercial interests must come first.

The late McLaren boss Teddy Mayer once said drivers were just "interchangeable lightbulbs -- you plug them in and they do the job".

In the 'good old days', and not even that far back, some drivers used to have it written into their contracts that they were the number two, and that could have meant even handing over a car.

For most present-day fans, the sport is called motor racing for a reason. They want to see a real race between real rivals. Formula One, particularly at a time of global financial hardship, does not want to alienate its audience.

"The show is what generates the fans; the fans are what generates the sponsors, and the sponsors generate sponsorship which allows us to run the teams," Mercedes team managing director Nick Fry said after Sunday's race. "They are the customers at the end of the day, and we have got to put on a good show."

Ferrari, effectively the Italian national team, is synonymous with Formula One and boasts an unrivalled 60-year pedigree. The team did not get that without being adept at looking after number one.

Winning the title seems to be all that matters to Ferrari, and they clearly felt Alonso was the best bet of achieving that. The fine is a drop in the ocean compared to what they are paying him.

A Massa victory would have been emotional, coming a year to the day since his near-fatal accident in Hungary, but such sentiment was not allowed to influence the decision.

McLaren team principal Martin Whitmarsh, who took part in a fans' forum earlier this month to get 'closer' to the public, refused to join the condemnation of Ferrari but was clearly concerned. His team is enjoying a surge of popular support with its two British world champions, Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button, and Whitmarsh, the head of the teams' association FOTA, hopes to expand that fan base further.

In other words, disenchantment with the sport is not good for any team.

"I think having our drivers racing (each other), in the longer term, is a healthy thing to do for this team," he told reporters.