I think the situation with certain teams, Ferrari probably the most obviously, meant that the FIA were forced into it, as the rule was very hard to enforce, when are team orders actually being used? Clearly you can penalise for the blatant moving across seen before, but teams can be more subtle. Like today, if Hamilton had received the "lift and coast" messages, and his need to manage fuel let Rosberg through, nobody would have called it team orders, but how "pre-cautious" can Mercedes be before it's team orders to manipulate the result? Do you then have to look at every call during a race every time team-mates swap places, to see if any looked unnecessary? It's just going to get messy, you'll have more legal fights, and altering results after the chequered flag just makes the sport seem more ridiculous to the casual viewer.
Exactly, very difficult to actually implement the team orders rule properly as for some people there is a lot of ambiguity of what a team order precisely is and when it is acceptable to employ them
So long as teams field more than one driver and earn their crust in a Teams' World Championship, team orders will always exist â to a greater or lesser extent, whether or not they are explicitly allowed â but it is the way in which they are implemented which risks (or reduces) the likelihood of a public backlash. This can be difficult to manage but must always take adequate account of the 'colour' of public opinion and will vary between every driver and team, according to how that driver or team is already perceived immediately prior to any such order. And it is this last part where the various factions within Red Bull have been rather naïve, in my opinion. The public will naturally tend to lean 'for' or 'against' specific examples of team orders according to their driver preference (itself based on previous events); and this means that team orders which are (or become) public will always need to be very carefully managed in order to avoid a PR disaster. This is especially true of Red Bull spokespersons, who have not always convinced the world that individuals within their management have been singing the same tune â Christian Horner being especially vulnerable after a series of blithering gaffs when trying to smooth over apparently one-sided decisions made from above his own head â and most notably from the outspoken 'father figure' to Vettel: Helmut Marko. One way or another, they've done their best to emulate what they perceived as 'the Ferrari way'; but unlike their new pretender, Ferrari have been in the game far longer and are showing signs of having out-grown such public clumsiness*. *As far as Ferrari are concerned, I think credit is very much due to Stefano Domenicali, not only in managing his drivers so as to be relatively fit for public consumption but also in managing his own boss; Lucifer di Montezemolo! Unfortunately for Red Bull PR (BS?!?), Christian Horner is just not strong enough in character to perform similar miracles under Mateschitz or â and, in particular â Marko.
