Kimi Raikkonen, Ferrari, Red Bull Ring, 2018

Wolff “not surprised” by lack of Ferrari team orders

RaceFans Round-up

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In the round-up: Toto Wolff says it would have been a “brutal” call for Ferrari to order Kimi Raikkonen to let Sebastian Vettel finish in front of him in Austria.

What they say

RaceFans asked Toto Wolff whether he was surprised Ferrari hadn’t promoted their leading driver in the championship:

We wouldn’t have and I’m not surprised that they didn’t. I think for the sake of the sport and the fans and the drivers, at that stage of the season, the beginning of July, switching drivers is quite a brutal call. They haven’t done it, we wouldn’t have done it.

Quotes: Dieter Rencken

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Comment of the day

Is Sergio Perez justified in his complaint about Force India’s team orders in Austria?

I don’t know why Perez is acting so disillusioned with the team order.

I remember they asked Ocon to let Perez through (probably because Perez on super-softs was capable of chasing down the car in front). After he failed to do so, they reversed positions again. Seems fairly standard.

Maybe Perez should have raced Ocon for the position if he wanted to finish in front.
@Todfod

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On this day in F1

  • On this day in 1988 Alain Prost passed Ayrton Senna to win the French Grand Prix

Author information

Keith Collantine
Lifelong motor sport fan Keith set up RaceFans in 2005 - when it was originally called F1 Fanatic. Having previously worked as a motoring...

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33 comments on “Wolff “not surprised” by lack of Ferrari team orders”

  1. JohnnyRye (@)
    3rd July 2018, 1:26

    I thought this year there was an increase in content? It seems the Round-up has less and less content.

    1. The round up alone has varied content depending on new of a given day. Overall content of the site has grown fantastically this year with more contributors and categories of motorsport covered.

    2. @johnnyrye, The emphasis seems to be on having more in-house, stand-alone, articles rather than directing traffic to other sites in the round-up. I don’t think this is a good policy (for me at least) but it is understandable given the competition for a falling fan-base.

      1. JohnnyRye (@)
        3rd July 2018, 3:47

        @hohum, fair point. I got used to getting a lot of the quick hit news articles here. Just disappointed that I can get less and less of it is all.

        1. @johnnyrye, same here, I have no interest in reading about drivers/teams weak excuses or hurt feelings etc. but I am interested in informed analysis’ from respected sources and the roundup saved me searching through my bookmarks to find them.

          1. @johnnyrye @scottie @hohum Thanks for the feedback guys. Can I ask what if any articles from elsewhere over the last 24 hours haven’t been included which you feel should have been?

          2. @keithcollantine, you’ll find links to various articles via this link which could have been included.

            Of course, it is your site/blog, and you can judge the best if you get more/less clicks and comments when making changes.
            I noticed though that the ’round-up’ is no longer my first page to go to. I now use other news aggregators to get my first injection of F1 news.
            As far as I’m concerned I prefer the round-up to be:
            1. first and foremost a reel of links to other sites with interesting F1 (Motorsports) news. (and as you know the more links and clicks to other sites, the more Google will like you)
            2. The Twitter/Instagram mentions are a nice 2nd (but please keep out those journos with their meaningless opinions who just want to hear themselves – e.g Sunday something about quali vs football).
            3. What They Say is a great addition, but IMO should never be first. If it is something unique you are hearing then award it a separate article.
            4. And then the nice closing parts: On This Day – COTD – Birthdays

      2. IMO the issue is not that racefans.net stopped redirecting to other sites, but that the overall quality of what is out there to get is not getting much better, so there really aren’t that many original articles to point towards @hohum, @johnnyrye @coldfly – many of those are now rewritten team statements and autosport/motors etc variants on the same articles.

        But all in all, I do like to have the roundup giving a thorough as possible overview of F1 articles from various sources @keithcollantine, if you can find a way to have more included (if they are out there) I would appreciate that too.

        1. @keithcollantine, you’re still my #1 site, JS or F1 next if I’m looking for something, I think Bascb and coldfly covered it. Cheers.

  2. Consider it the journalistic version of “Size Zero”.
    If I am not mistaken, the content may be less, but the frequency of publication is up.
    Must admit I enjoy the Round-Up (not to be confused with the horticultural version) for the variety and timeliness of topics.
    Keep it up, yes, there are Race Fans^2 out there.
    Thanks. and yes, this is a confirmed and original source.

  3. I imagine just about any issue other than money would’ve been an obstacle to Bernie.

  4. I doubt if these average viewership numbers take into consideration the fact that an increasing number of viewers now have recording features in their sets which lets them record the races and watch at a convenient time. For example, I almost invariably record most races and watch them an hour or few after – at a convenient time. The only flip side being I cannot access any news sites or speak to my friends for fear I’d come to know the result!

    1. Absolutely: I have a young family, as many others do, and frankly if the weather’s nice, we’re going out during the day.

      Normally watch the race after their bedtime, because my Sky box know when all the races are.

      Apart from Belgium 2017, which I was at, I haven’t watched a race in real time since 2014

    2. On demand is a must for F1. Not just the live sessions but also classic races, docu’s and seperate items/interviews and especially educational pieces that explain tyres, aero, strategy, rules and historical context of the sport. All via F1TV/apps and the various rightsholders like SkyF1 and Ziggo and what have you.

      In addition they have to start selling some of those items and races as stand-alone broadcasts to the open net along with pre-made 30min weekend recaps, they also have to start thinking about putting out that free content via YouTube/twitch and their website and they should make realtime timing accesable via free apps, sites/blogs like these. They should work with podcasters/vloggers/blogs/etc as influencers and provider them with acces and content to get the product out.

      All this is nescessary to attract new and keep old viewers, emerse them in the narratives of F1 (thats why knowledge of the sport and it’s history is so important) and eventually convert them to full-on F1 fans that want to pay for all the content via F1TV and/or the rightsholders like Sky.

      Liberty has started to do some of these things but they need to do more and progress more quickly, along with improving the racing itself obviously. Othewise F1 viewership might drop below a critical point and building it back up would be very hard and expensive.

      Finally, fossil fuels are eventually, and I think sooner rather than later, going to go the route tabacco went and Alcohol sponsoring is going now (as will consumer products like RedBull and fastfood eventually, but thats a discussion for another time) F1 needs to be ahead of that trend and move towards clean racing. Not just to please manufacture brands and be road – relevant, but to stay relevant in the world period.

      1. You think F1 is going to ban advertising consumer products? Smoking was a no brainer, there is no way to smoke without harming yourself and it’s too easy to harm others too, so it’s not controversial to stop glamorising it. Arguably the same with alcohol, although it is possible to drink without harming yourself and a very low percentage of drinkers harm others – but the harm caused is significantly greater.

        Energy drinks and fast food though are another step back, and I think we will have to reach oil crisis before petrochemical products are banned, likely they will just have stopped anyway by that point for being prohibitively expensive compared to the alternatives.

        Consumer products though? Come on, you can’t surely imagine that the cars are going to be banned from displaying Apple logos or Xbox banners, and if so, why?

        1. @Will Jones

          With “going the same route as tabacco” I don’t mean F1 banning them, I mean the way it’s viewed by society at large. Smoking slowly got more and more socially unacceptable and was eventually banned from the public spaces altogether. F1 had no choice in the matter and had to follow the social consensus when tabocco advertisement got banned.

          I don’t know for sure, but I think fossil fuels will become socially unacceptable within a generation, like tabacoo was. And as with tabacco F1 will have to ban fossil fuels as a result of that at some point in the future (not because F1 want’s to, but because they have to).

          With consumer products I don’t mean all consumer products of course, but products like alcohol and fastfood.

    3. @thedoctor03, it is something that is being observed in some other sports, such as football – where subscription channels are now starting to lose popularity as viewers switch to catch up services or highlights services instead – so there will be some element of that hiding some of the longer term trends in viewing figures.

      However, at the moment there does not seem to be an effective way of capturing what exactly that shift in viewing habits is.

    4. Yes, especially for those viewers not in Europe or the country of the race in question. I may keep a slightly odd schedule, but waking up at 7:00 AM on a Sunday is a thing that would result in my barely sleeping, so I watch almost all races recorded (aside from those on the same continent, and occasionally Japan or another that comes on more in the midnight/1:00 AM range here).

      I think a significant number of people must be recording any race you look at. There are substantial portions of the globe in which every individual race is broadcast at a terrible time for, and most of those people aren’t going to give up hope of a reasonable amount of sleep on the weekend in order to watch live.

  5. In respect of Karun Chandok’s tweet all I can say is that people in F1 and the F1 media (and anyone else in a public position to be fair) need to realise that what people say on twitter and what real fans/people think are not the same thing.

    1. Matteo (@m-bagattini)
      3rd July 2018, 9:25

      @geemac what about the https://f1fanvoice.com website? I’m using it and I hope they’ll listen. At least it’s better than shouting to no one over Twitter.

      1. Thanks for that @m-bagattini, I wasn’t aware of that. I’ll have to have a look.

  6. I watched the race on F1TV afterwards. I don’t know if only live viewers count, but for central europe, 3pm on a sunny day is not a good time, so it’s not surprising the views are down if that is the case. Plus the world cup.

  7. Ferrari proved that, at least in the last few years, this no.2 situation they allegedly promote… is mostly a myth. To get VET ahead they could have tried even this “pretty new” way to switch positions by saying VET is faster than RAI and he has more chances to pass VER and, if not, they’ll switch back. Instead, they simply let the race unfold naturally.

    1. Still, Ferrari is responsible for the “no team orders” rule (Schumacher/Barrichello, Austria 2002) and the end of the “no team orders” rule (Germany, 2010), and fans tend not to forget these things.

      There have also been incidents where it seemed the pit wall strategy was designed to get Vettel ahead of Raikkonen,

  8. What I find surprising is that Sauber asked their drivers to switch places. I can’t see the benefit for the team other than boosting LeClerc’s value and more PR.
    I would understand if Ferrari did it even though the season is relatively young.

  9. @mg1982 I think that if this was one of the last races they would have switched positions. The fact is that Kimi is very emotional and switching now means he’ll fade out for the rest of the season. Maybe someone at Maranello understood this and knows that if they want the constructor’s championship they need Kimi at his best, involved in the WDC, in the loop for a win. Simple cost (3 points) – benefit (happy Kimi) analysis IMHO.

    1. The fact is that Kimi is very emotional

      Ah ah, good one :-D @m-bagattini

      1. @ldom LOL ok I translated to the wrong adjective from my language and it looks that it has a different meaning in English. Obviously, he doesn’t display emotions, but his behavior is very much affected by them IMHO. He’s not reliable, a grain of sand in his shoe can compromise a race. If he feels he can catch a podium and the car is good he tries to go for it, but if has some problem, even minor, he never pushes. Dunno, honestly I think he could do much more with Ferrari but he just wasn’t in the right mood in tons of races.

        1. No but you’re right. We’ve seen with Lotus how it is when he’s not motivated.

    2. @m-bagattini – the cost of 3 points must be calculated against the amount of points a motivated driver will take away from the opposition – the more races left in the season, the more gain is to be found. If Lewis finishes in front of Kimi for the rest of the races this season, it doesn’t help Vettel in the individual championship, but a motivated Kimi will still help Ferrari in the constructors. If Kimi can get ahead of Lewis in a few races, where Lewis has issues, then Vettel can benefit a lot.

      1. spot on… ferrari and vettel can benefit A LOT from a stronger kimi(just like lewis benefit from rosberg or bottas or vice versa), people are quick to jump in the train of ferrari is ruining kimi to make vettel win, i seriously doubt that ferrari this 3 years have been making kimi fight for 5th or 6th and just to let vettel fight for 1st, there is simply no gain, the reality is and some tin foil hats are never going to admit, that kimi doesnt have it anymore, im really hoping that what i saw in austria remain to that level or even more… but i still have doubts..

        the biggest example on why vettel and ferrari needs a stronger kimi … bahrain… everything was going perfect for ferrari, lewis far away in 4th but no pace… bottas 2nd with kimi close enough to affect his strategy, the idea was (because lewis was not in the play) 2 pit stops, pit kimi a second time(thats when he broke the poor guys leg) and because kimi was going to be on fresher tire by the end of the race could catch bottas, that idea would make mercedes respond and pit bottas too, if bottas pit then vettel can safely pit and still be ahead, but as soon as kimi retired the whole plan changed, ferrari had to risky and go till the end with 1 stop strategy.. thats why 2015..2016… and 2017 most of the time mercedes would outsmart ferrari… it was 2 strategies ( lewis and bottas) vs 1 (sebastian) while kimi was fighting maybe a redbull in 5th or 6th… theres almost no way that 1 can win against 2 if they’re in the range.

        ferrari needs a kimi like austria on a regular basis… or he has to go.. game over

  10. Spot on Chandhok. I couldn’t agree more with him.
    – I also agree with the COTD.

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