In motor racing, team orders is the practice of teams issuing instructions to drivers to deviate from the normal practice of racing against each other as they would against other teams' drivers. This can be accomplished either in advance, simply by establishing a pecking order between the drivers within the team, or by instructing a driver to let their teammate overtake or to hold position without the risk of collision.
This is generally done when one driver is behind in a particular race but ahead overall in a championship season. The team will then order their drivers to rearrange themselves on the track so as to give more championship points to a driver who is ahead in the championship. Team orders may also be given when multiple drivers are in a position far ahead of the field, being all but assured of the win. Team orders are issued to prevent drivers from racing each other, so that they conserve fuel, reduce the likelihood of mechanical failure, and avoid a collision. Such orders have been made on countless occasions in the history of motorsport, sometimes causing great acrimony between the team and the disadvantaged driver, and controversy in the media.
Team orders in Formula One Early examples Such orders were legal and accepted historically in motor racing. In the early years of the Formula One World Championship, it was even legal for a driver to give up his car during the race to the team leader if the latter's car had broken down.
In 1955, the Mercedes team asked Juan Manuel Fangio to let his teammate Stirling Moss win his home Grand Prix at Aintree. Fangio obliged, refusing to attack Moss in the closing stages of the race, and came home in second place, less than a second behind Moss.
The 1964 season saw a dramatic finale in which Lorenzo Bandini moved over for John Surtees during the Mexican Grand Prix, allowing Surtees to get the necessary points to beat Graham Hill to the World Championship.
In the 1979 German Grand Prix Clay Regazzoni was instructed by the Williams pits not to attack his teammate Alan Jones for the lead, despite Regazzoni being ahead in the championship.Christian Bounay and Clay Regazzoni, Le Combat, Solar, 1982. The status of Jones as number one driver at Williams lasted until 1981, when Carlos Reutemann deliberately ignored team orders at the 1981 Brazilian Grand Prix and did not allow him to pass. This resulted in a long feud between the two that eventually led to Jones' retirement at the end of the season, with Reutemann missing out on the World Championship by a single point.
At the 1982 French Grand Prix, René Arnoux enraged Renault by refusing to give way to his teammate Alain Prost, who at the time was ahead in the championship. However, those three points had no impact, as Prost finished fourth in the championship that year, ten points behind eventual champion Keke Rosberg. During the 1983 South African Grand Prix, the Brabham-BMW team asked driver Riccardo Patrese to cede Nelson Piquet the race win if it ensured Piquet would win the driver's championship. However, this did not prove to be necessary as Patrese won the race while Piquet came third, enough to secure him the championship.ESPN coverage of the South African Grand Prix. Patrese was asked "If there was a situation where you had to give up the victory for Nelson to win the championship, what would you have done?", Patrese's response was "Yes, that was already planned. ... Nelson started with less fuel and my role was to slow the field to give him a big lead." Available on YouTube. Patrese found himself in a similar situation in 1992, when he waved his Williams teammate Nigel Mansell through during the 1992 French Grand Prix, which Mansell went on to win ahead of Patrese in second.
Negative media reception In the late 1990s, incidents of team orders began to be reported more prominently by the media, and public reaction to the more blatant examples became extremely negative. At the 1997 European Grand Prix, Jacques Villeneuve, having already clinched the title (after a controversial collision with Michael Schumacher, which Villeneuve's Williams survived), was asked by his engineer via radio to let the McLaren cars pass as "they've been very helpful",Timothy Collings, The Piranha Club: Power and Influence in Formula One, Virgin Books, 2004. while at the 1998 Australian Grand Prix, the McLaren drivers David Coulthard and Mika Häkkinen caused a stir by switching position at the end of the race in order to respect a previous agreement. In contrast to prior examples, the 1997 Japanese Grand Prix saw a more sophisticated use of team orders, where Ferrari driver Eddie Irvine began the race light on fuel, allowing him to get ahead of the superior Williams cars and hold them up, to the benefit of teammate Michael Schumacher.
At the 1998 Belgian Grand Prix, the two Jordans of Damon Hill and Ralf Schumacher found themselves unexpectedly in the lead after a collision between Michael Schumacher and David Coulthard. Ralf was subsequently ordered not to overtake Hill, to assure Jordan of a 1-2 finish. Following this, Michael angrily bought out his brother's contract for £2 million and told Eddie Jordan that Ralf would never race for Jordan again. At the 1999 German Grand Prix, Mika Salo, driving for Ferrari in place of the injured Michael Schumacher, was leading the race when he was told to allow teammate Eddie Irvine to pass. Salo complied, giving up what would have been his only Formula One victory in 109 career races. Irvine ultimately failed to win the championship that year, losing out to Mika Häkkinen.
At the 2002 Austrian Grand Prix, Rubens Barrichello was ordered to allow Ferrari teammate Michael Schumacher to pass to obtain the win. This received huge amounts of negative attention from the media, as the order was issued shortly before both drivers crossed the finish line. Both drivers were unhappy about the situation. Schumacher refused to take the top step of the podium and the centre seat, normally reserved to the winner, during the post-race press conference, and the team was punished for breach of podium procedure. At the United States Grand Prix the same year, Schumacher appeared to have returned the favour by giving Barrichello the win by the record smallest margin of 0.011 seconds on, though it is assumed Schumacher was trying to trigger a dead-heat finish.
At the 2002 French Grand Prix, the financially troubled Arrows team had failed to reach an agreement with its sponsors, thus the team ordered both its drivers, Heinz-Harald Frentzen and Enrique Bernoldi to deliberately fail to qualify by posting times slower than the 107% rule.
Team orders ban After the 2002 season, FIA announced that "Team Orders that could influence the outcome of a race" were banned, although they were sometimes still implemented discreetly.
Ferrari team orders at the 2010 German Grand Prix For example, this has sometimes been achieved by a team getting on the radio to the slower driver and pointing out that his teammate is quicker. The slower driver then lets the quicker driver through without the need for an overt "directive" from the team. This happened, for example, at the 2010 German Grand Prix, Felipe Massa's race engineer Rob Smedley was heard to say to his driver "Fernando is faster than you. Can you confirm you understand that message?" Moments later, Massa eased back and allowed Alonso past.
Crashgate
Perhaps the most controversial use of team orders, occurring during the period where team orders were explicitly banned, was the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix, where the Renault F1 team used team orders to instruct Nelson Piquet Jr. to crash deliberately on the fourteenth lap of the race in order to bring out the safety car, allowing his team-mate Alonso (who was proven to know nothing about the scheme) to win the race. Subsequent investigation the following year resulted in Renault receiving a two-year suspended disqualification (expired in 2011) and Flavio Briatore and Pat Symonds, two major figures involved with the team, being banned from the sport, although this was later appealed and reversed under a settlement that forbade them from working in any FIA-sanctioned events for a time.
Ban repealed At the end of the 2010 season, the FIA conceded that the team orders rule was not working and needed to be reviewed. As of 2011, the team orders rule no longer appeared in the sporting regulations.
At the 2012 United States Grand Prix, Ferrari broke the FIA seal on the gearbox of Felipe Massa's car in order to trigger a 5-place grid penalty. This moved him behind Fernando Alonso and shifted both cars onto the "clean" side of the race track, to ensure Alonso the fastest start possible on the slippery asphalt of the brand-new Circuit of the Americas.
At the 2013 Malaysian Grand Prix, Red Bull Racing driver Sebastian Vettel was criticised for passing his team-mate Mark Webber to win the race, despite having received an order from his team to hold position.
At the 2017 Hungarian Grand Prix, the Mercedes team ordered Valtteri Bottas to yield his third position for Lewis Hamilton, who had a better chance to attack second-placed Kimi Räikkönen. When it was clear that Hamilton was not able to overcome Räikkönen, Hamilton gave back the position to Bottas in the last corner of the race, costing him three points in the Drivers' Championship. Those three points did not matter in the end, as Hamilton won the title by 46 points. At the 2018 German Grand Prix, after Vettel crashed and brought out the safety car, Hamilton inherited the lead, with team-mate Bottas behind him on fresher tyres. When the safety car period ended, Bottas initially attacked Hamilton for the lead, before being told by Mercedes' team strategist James Vowles to hold his position, handing Hamilton the win. Bottas continued to play second fiddle to Hamilton at the 2018 Russian Grand Prix, where he qualified on pole and subsequently led the race until being ordered to yield the lead to his teammate, who was ahead in the Drivers' Championship. At the 2019 Australian Grand Prix, Ferrari ordered Charles Leclerc to hold position after he attempted to overtake team-mate Vettel. Two races later, at the Chinese Grand Prix, Leclerc was ordered by Ferrari team principal Mattia Binotto to let Vettel pass him. Binotto later said the team made the "right choice" by making the call, as Vettel finished on the podium in third whilst Leclerc finished fifth.