Gary Anderson is spot on with this article. He says drivers need to co-operate when it is in the best interests of achieving the best results for the team, as it is a team game. But he also says that while Massa was wrong with his behaviour, Williams made a couple of key strategic errors during the race.
Autosport.com wrote:
Gary Anderson: Why F1 needs team orders
AUTOSPORT's technical expert GARY ANDERSON has vast experience of calling the shots from the pitwall, and he explains why team orders still have a place in F1
By Gary Anderson
AUTOSPORT technical expert
Felipe Massa's refusal to obey an order from the Williams pitwall to let team-mate Valtteri Bottas past in the closing stages of the Malaysian Grand Prix earned him plenty of sympathy and the team a huge amount of criticism.
But this was very different from what Massa experienced at Ferrari, where there was a driver with clear number-one status no matter what the circumstances.
The problem is, if a driver doesn't respect team orders, the team is sacrificing potential points and there can be very serious consequences in terms of results not just in one race, but for the whole year.
Williams was simply responding to race circumstances. The FW36 was quicker than Jenson Button's McLaren and all the team wanted to do was to get one or both of its cars ahead, irrespective of what order they were in.
There's always a fine line to tread when using team orders, but when one car is potentially quicker than the other, you have to think about releasing them.
It's about far more than just one driver's result compared to the other, it's about the team. By letting Bottas have a go at Button, there was the possibility that seventh and eighth could have been turned into sixth and eighth, or even sixth and seventh.
Come the end of the season, if you pick up a place or two in the constructors' championship because of a few extra points, that's worth money which should allow you to produce an even better car for the drivers to benefit from next year.
It's up to the drivers not to put their egos ahead of the interests of the team. And as long as any orders are issued in the right way and based on the race situation, drivers have to accept that while it might hurt now, it will pay back later on when the roles are reversed.
Let's say you have a situation where one driver is catching the other at a significant rate. Once he gets within 1.5-2 seconds, he's losing downforce, hurting his tyres and giving up performance. If he's significantly faster than the car ahead, there's no reason why that performance won't continue if he's let past.
So you either order him to sit two seconds behind to avoid slowing himself down, which we saw Red Bull do with Daniel Ricciardo, or you make sure he gets through quickly so that you can use the speed of the car.
What the team has to do is recognise these situations and react to them straight away, because you lose your advantage if you don't get them past quickly.
We saw Williams suffering with that in Malaysia. During the first stint, it ended up with Massa sat behind Kevin Magnussen and Bottas sat behind Massa.
There was no point in Massa sitting right behind Magnussen for lap after lap; he would have been better off dropping back, working out where the advantage was and then attacking.
Magnussen had a damaged front wing, so it should have been possible for Massa to press home the advantage.
Instead, Massa sat behind him, with Bottas right behind him, so all the two cars were doing was slowing themselves down, losing time following Magnussen and dropping well behind Button, who was seven seconds up the road by the time his McLaren team-mate got out of the way of Massa and Bottas by pitting.
When you have a situation like Williams does between drivers, it can have bigger consequences. I remember being in similar circumstances in the 1997 Argentinian Grand Prix when I was at Jordan, when Ralf Schumacher and Giancarlo Fisichella collided.
Giancarlo made a small mistake at the exit of a corner and Ralf decided to take advantage. He made a late move into a right-hander, Giancarlo turned in and they made contact. Ralf survived and finished third, but Giancarlo was out.
We were still very content with finishing third, as we were a small team and it was only the fourth time a Jordan had finished on the podium. But Ralf did get a talking to after the race. He said the guy made a mistake and he tried to take advantage, but Giancarlo turned in on him. So it was all a bit tit for tat.
I blamed Ralf for trying, but also believed Fisi should have been willing to give up the corner because he was the one who made the mistake. But as well as the fact that it put one car out of the race, the big problem was the relationship between them afterwards: Fisi just lost confidence in Ralf and suddenly they wouldn't work together.
The race engineers sided with their drivers and suddenly there was no co-operation. You'd see engineers going off and doing things under the counter in their own way.
So you sit them down and tell them that's not how it's going to work, but you've lost that free-flow of information and instead it's about forced sharing. That is a problem.
Maybe next time Bottas won't respect an order like the one he was given early in the race to stay behind Massa. What if he attacks and there's a collision? When you get distrust between team-mates, this can be a serious problem.
We saw it with Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber in Turkey 2010. That was just about the worst-case scenario because it cost Red Bull a one-two finish.
There are few teams in F1 that have an obvious number one and number two. Perhaps you could argue that Vettel and Ricciardo is the clearest example, and that's simply because Sebastian's status as a four-times world champion is significantly higher than Dan's at the moment.
But even then, they can get in each other's way. We saw an example of this in Malaysia after Nico Rosberg had his big moment on the first lap. He looked a sitting duck for at least one Red Bull, maybe both, but they were too busy battling each other to take advantage. If Vettel or Ricciardo had got ahead of Rosberg on the first lap, it would have changed the race.
But as Ricciardo pointed out when Vettel was sitting behind Rosberg, there are times when you want to be up there in case something kicks off and you can make up a place, so it's not always clear-cut.
That's why you need to be respectful of the team. Yes, you are racing your team-mate, but you have to leave a bit more margin and think carefully about what you're doing.
When you've got up to 700 people working for a team, putting a huge amount of effort in, there's nothing worse for them than seeing drivers getting selfish on track and compromising results.
Things are more complicated when it comes to throwing your weight behind one driver. It has to be recognised that at the end of the season, inevitably one will be ahead. Mercedes is in an interesting situation, with Rosberg leading the championship and Lewis Hamilton his main rival.
They are both at similar stages in their career, but assuming Mercedes is dominant, one of them has to be second and you can't just alternate wins.
Hamilton has two pole positions, which shows he has the speed. Would he have won in Melbourne? Maybe, which means you might have had two races with Hamilton first and Rosberg second.
If Red Bull gets more competitive and becomes a championship threat, do you decide that Lewis is your shot?
Remember, too, that with double points at the end of the season a rival team and driver can just hang on and nick it at the final race. Winning championships is not easy, and we have seen them lost to a failure of team management.
What you can't do is ignore the issue and assume everything will sort itself out. That's where things can spiral out of control. There will be times where you need your drivers to co-operate to the advantage of the team, and they must accept this will be the case. As Bottas himself said after the race, maybe you will score more points as a team that way.
But Mercedes remains in a very strong position and it could be a while before another team is able to threaten them. The wet qualifying sessions have distorted the competitive order, so it's interesting to look at outright performance in the early races to see how things really stack up.
At every race, I take the fastest single lap by each driver/team and convert it into a percentage of the outright quickest, which allows you to equally weight the 19 race weekends.
If you use pure lap time, gaps at a longer track like Sepang will inevitably be bigger even if, relatively speaking, they might be the same as at a shorter track. Here's how the team order stacks up at the front of the field:
1. Mercedes, 100.000%
2. Ferrari, 100.976%
3. Red Bull, 101.049%
4. McLaren, 101.453%
5. Williams, 101.422%
A one per cent deficit equates to a second around a 1m40s lap, which is roughly where Sepang sits, so there's still a long way to go for the rest. Red Bull looks to have a superb car aerodynamically, but the wet qualifying sessions have definitely helped it to start in stronger positions.
The peak power of the Renault engine isn't so strong, which is a big problem in qualifying when you can use the maximum fuel flow rate and ideally a full 4MJ of ERS around the lap.
Once you're into the race and the fuel consumption has to be a little lower and the ERS is restricted by the fact you can only harvest 2MJ per lap from the rear brakes, plus whatever you can get from the MGU-H attached to the turbo, things close up.
So it will be a while before Mercedes is seriously challenged, and the team has to ensure it maximises its potential, starting with another one-two in Bahrain this weekend.
But as Williams showed with Bottas and Massa, problems can arise if your drivers don't buy into the fact that it's a team game. That's something Mercedes will have to watch out for, because there will come a time when situations have to be managed.
As for Williams, it says the situation has been resolved; there was a proper discussion on Sunday night, so things weren't allowed to fester.
But keep an eye out for signs of similar problems in the future, whether it's Massa and Bottas not co-operating, or the team compromising its potential by letting its drivers fight each other.
I've been up on that pitwall calling the shots in situations like these and it's not easy.
But while on the outside, team orders appears to be a case of favouring one driver over the other, it's actually about giving both the best chance to get the best results for themselves and, more importantly, the team over the entire season.
After all, results are what it's all about.
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