You're kidding right? When one qualifies on pole and the other's out in Q2, and they both have Red Bull plastered on the side, I think it's pretty obvious to anyone betting who's going to finish ahead. You mentioned in an earlier post about Saubers letting Ferraris past so they didn't lose speed - it's a waste of time for a TR to fight an RBR, it's a faster car.
Seriously? Bringing the sport into disrepute because he let another car pass? And this counts as fixing? If a car has a bad stop like McLaren did last year and gets dropped behind a Caterham, they let them pass, resistance is futile. It doesn't bring the sport into disrepute, you're just using that because you realised inter-team orders isn't explicitly illegal.
I don't think there's any secret in the fact Toro Rosso and Red Bull are owned by the same guy. Perhaps you'd like to open a poll on it to check how many members know that...
As for the engine issue, they basically do now, Cosworth doesn't really count so it's clearly a non-issue. I don't remember Lotus helping Red Bull in Brazil last year or Mercedes and McLaren helping each other out, and Bruno Senna in that Williams-RENAULT was certainly no friend of Vettel's.
Backmarker teams have their own stuff to worry about. Engine suppliers need customer teams and they're not going to go and alienate them all by making them fight the works team battles. Caterham was busy fighting Marussia not holding up Ferrari for RBR, and they even get a drivetrain from MK.
Of course everybody knows STR and RBR are owned by the same guy. And of course people know STR isn't ever going to race RBR even if, and this is the crucial point, even if they were in a position to do so. It's not a case of what people have managed to work out. If a journalist asked Christian Horner if STR are under instructions to jump out of the way of the Red Bulls and impede Ferrari, he would unquestionably deny it. He could not possibly admit it because everybody except you realises it isn't on. If he could admit it, presumably the other top teams would say, right, well if that's legitimate we'll have to start buying out the smaller teams, otherwise we will be at a disadvantage, and this takes us down a road nobody wants to go down.
Customer teams were supposedly banned at the end of 2009. RBR at that stage promised to stop sharing its IP with STR and very few people believe that happened either; most people think they just started giving them older stuff. But that doesn't mean that if STR were to be caught receiving IP from RBR and putting it on their car that they shouldn't be punished. The other purpse of banning customer teams was to stop top teams issuing team orders to their customer teams. All I'm saying is the FIA should keep an eye on this, and if it finds that STR is behaving like a customer team in this respect, it should do something.
You're right that normally, if say a Red Bull or a Ferrari has a nose change and falls to the back early on, there's no point STR fighting it when it comes back through. Just let it by without losing time. You also know that's not quite what STR do; they let the Red Bull through in such a way that the
Red Bull doesn't lose time, without caring about any time loss for themselves. Hence lifting on the straight. And if there's a Ferrari there, too, they aggressively turn in on it and try to impede it as much as possible, again not caring about their own time loss to their direct competitors. Furthermore you say resistance is futile when you're a slower car being overtaken by a faster one, but that depends on circumstances. Fast cars can experience problems and find themselves running behind slower cars late on. If there's only a lap left in the race it's got to be worth fighting, right? Is anybody on here convinced that STR would fight a Red Bull in those circumstances? I agree with you that most people, assuming they're not wet behind the ears, don't think they would, although they don't officially know that they wouldn't. It isn't conceded. How can this be good for the sport?
On the engine point (a) Cosworth does count and (b) the engines are as cheap as they've ever been in the modern era of the sport. Because there's no development there's comparatively little cost and the small teams are able to pay their way. Next year the cost for the engine manufacterers will go up massively and the manufacturers won't be able to pass the full cost onto the small teams without bankrupting them. So they will have to sell engines to the small teams at a loss, which is why they will be increasingly doing what Ferrari tried to do with Force India (as part of their 2014 engine deal which fell through) i.e. adding non-cash elements to the deal such as placing drivers from their young driver programme in the smaller team's car. Always a good way of ensuring cooperation...
All this is bound to go on in secret, but to the extent that collaboration between teams affects race results, yes I am dead serious that I regard it as fixing, I think it's fundamental to any sport that each separate competitor is actually competing with all the others (in F1 that means each team, since it's a team sport) and when collusion between teams is done so obviously that you can't miss it I think it's something the FIA should slam down on. If a car lifts on the straight to let a competitor past when ostensibly fighting for position, the stewards are entitled to ask why, and in the absence of a satisfactory explanation, to investigate further.
Edited by redreni, 07 April 2013 - 09:47.