I think your view of 'comparable team orders' is extremely broad, to the point that you will expect anyone who isn't either for or against all team orders (regardless of circumstance) to be hypocrites.
Personally, I find that rather simplistic, and your apparent superiority complex that stems from it (not saying you have one, but you might want to reread some of your posts for the impression they give) a little misguided.
Schumacher/Barrichello in Austria was, in my view, sufficiently different to Kimi/Massa in Brazil for someone to be ok with one, not ok with the other, and still remain consistent and reasonable in their views (incidentally, I was cool with both).
Really sorry for the essay, but...
I've taken your advice, Gareth, and re-read my posts. I can see where you and Sophie are coming from, and I am sure I would come across better if I would say that F1 ought to value the opinions of all its fans. Saying that some peoples' views are effectively not worth listening to isn't necessarily going to go down well. But having reflected on my position, honesty obliges me to say I still think it would be a mistake for F1 to pay too much attention to the opinion of the majority, on this sensitive and emotive issue in particular. And the people who's opinions shouldn't, in my humble opinion, be listened to are a particular category, and I'll try to clarify as much as I can what that category is, because I want to be careful not to cause any unnecessary upset. Anyone coming on this thread to discuss this issue, or even onto this forum, automatically disqualifies themselves from the group of people I'm talking about, and I respect the opinion of everybody here, without exception, on this topic and every other.
So at the risk of digging myself further into a hole, I'd like to clarify that if, on the question of team orders in particular, you take RealRacing and I as representing opposite ends of the spectrum of views, with him taking the view that it's all about the driver and that team orders get in the way of that and should be done away with, and me taking the view that it's all about the teams and the problem, if there is one, lies in getting drivers to be team players; I am not saying that those who take a position somewhere in between are hypocrites, or that they don't think about the issues coherently. I can see how you could interpret my comments that way, but I don't think that. I think it's perfectly possible to take a coherent position whereby team orders are sometimes okay and sometimes not, depending on circumstances. I think it's harder to take a position that team orders should be banned, either altogether or just in certain circumstances, because it's really difficult to tune the regulations to make everything fair, and to allow "good" team orders while preventing "bad" team orders. But there's a broad range of perfectly respectable opinion there, all of which should be listened to by the sport. But I worry that the sport would make a mistake if it reacted to every outcry, because outcries are driven by the broadcasters and the tabloid press, and are therefore not based on coherent or consistent views or principles, but rather on what makes a good story.
The broadcasters and the more senstationalist press like to pick the juiciest story out of a race and run with it in a big way, and accordingly, the reaction to cases of team orders tends to depend if the incident is picked up as an "angle" or not. So Sunday's team orders incident between the Mercedes drivers was picked up, and would have been a big story regardless of whether Hamilton had accepted the instruction or refused it, whereas BMW Sauber's team order at Montreal 2008 wasn't picked up as a story to anything like the same degree, because the preferred story of that race was, understandably, that a driver, Kubica, who was tipped for big things, had scored his maiden win, not what would have happened if Heidfeld had declined to let him go when they were on different strategies. So you get a big reaction to one case of team orders, and next to none for the other, and those are definitely comparable cases. In fact the Kubica/Heidfeld incident ought to have been more controversial not only because the team order was acted upon and affected the result (it was for the win, not a squabble over third), but also because it was done in defiance of a regulatory ban on team orders, which may be another reason why the broadcasters didn't run with the story, despite the very obvious nature of the manoeuver where Heidfeld let Kubica past - it was in the era where team orders could and did occur, but nobody dared speak their name. We used to have a very unhealthy situation where the broadcasters, teams and everybody else had to treat team orders as a dirty little secret, which everyone knew about but nobody could stop or talk openly about, and I worry that that all arose out of the sport introducing a bad rule because of an outcry that was driven by the media, and mostly involved people who aren't hypocrites, but who simply don't take as deep an interest in the sport as we do, and therefore won't have thought all the issues through or formed a coherent, defensible position on these matters. My answer is: let there be an outcry occasionally. Outcries are good for business, and that's why the media whips them up.
Edited by redreni, 30 July 2014 - 21:26.