No room for sentiment in F1

Justin: I think we can all agree there is plenty to discuss following the Ferrari 1-2 in Germany. I received two rather colorful text messages from people not liking what happened at all...but they both seemed to blame Fernando Alonso rather than the powers that be at Ferrari.

First off.....Massa bashing yet again...but if he'd have been a lot faster over the first half of the year, the chances are that he wouldn't have had to endure yesterday. Fact, Alonso has panned him good and proper and is the only one even remotely looking like pushing for a title challenge. Fact, Alonso has found himself behind a much slower Massa in a couple of races before now and Ferrari did absolutely nothing. If they kept on doing nothing, Massa might crawl back up to 7th in the title standings, but Alonso would well and truly lose all fading hopes of a third title.

Even Martin Brundle himself observed that he would do exactly the same as Massa was backing Alonso into Vettel and to protect maximum team points he'd swap the drivers over and deal with any fallout later on.

Now, don't get me wrong, I don't like seeing blatant swapping of positions based on orders at all....but it does happen a lot more than anyone probably realises. See DC's remarks about it after the race.

Whilst I was searching around for news about the fallout from the race, I read Andrew Benson's BBC blog (seriously Andrew come and join us for a guest blog) and he made an excellent remark stating that this is no different from 2007 where Massa moved over for Kimi to win the title. If Massa had stayed in first, Hamilton would have won the title, yet nobody even noticed or cared about this blatant and brazen team order. Alonso is the best hope by a country mile for a Ferrari tilt at the drivers title, so what happened...happened...yet everyone is disgusted. Why werent people disgusted when Massa moved aside in 2007 to gift Kimi the title?

Even Schumi himself.....dear god am I really looking to him to aid my arguement?? stated that team orders still happen and should happen - balance this with him also saying he could definately see why people complained so much about his 2002 mishap to which my co-blogger refers.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/andrewbenson/2010/07/team_orders_rule_ties_f1_in_kn.html.

What the result does is give Alonso hope - he is in a good car now and he will look to push on with another win in Hungary. Mclaren look off the pace and in Germany Ferrari were easily the fastest out there.

I think part of the reason there was a big uproar was that it was Massa being asked to move aside. Unfortunately, coming back from a huge crash there is no fairytale ending a year on with a win in Germany. As we all know, there is no room for sentiment in formula one.

As for Alonso, I shall defend him, as nobody else seems to amidst all the character assasination. All he did was get utterly frustrated and utter "this is ridiculous" when he kept trying to get past massa all the while falling prey to Vettel. We all know the Latin blood boils when being stuck behind the mobile chicane that is Massa.

It made some sense. Massa was struggling throughout with his second set of tyres and was frankly all over the shop on some laps as Alonso lurked with intent. This has been his issue all year, getting tyres quickly up to temperature.

What I think is totally disgusting is the way Ferrari said it was Massa's idea! We all know this to be utter bullshit. As anyone that has read DC's book knows, its not in an F1 drivers nature to move over and let someone else win, especially your team-mate.

Rob Smedley really needs to work on his code system though! Another point here is that DC criticised Ferrari for putting the message via the driver engineer. When he got the instruction at Mclaren it was always someone in management that did it. Stefano Domenicalli is a bit cowardly when it comes to this then.

See look, I have defended what happened whilst bashing Ferrari too....a reasonable stance given Alonso is a fave of mine.