This is the fourth entry in our F1 Myths and Madness series. The idea that both cars on a team are always racing each other as hard as they race everyone else is one of the most persistent myths in the sport, and two moments in F1 history prove exactly how far that idea is from reality.
The Myth Fans Want to Believe
Formula 1 markets itself around individual battles, driver versus driver, lap after lap. What gets talked about far less is that both drivers on a team ultimately work for the same organization, chasing the same Constructors’ Championship prize money in addition to their individual Drivers’ Championship, which means a team’s interests and an individual driver’s interests do not always line up. When they diverge, teams have to choose, and that choice occasionally becomes public in ways that embarrass everyone involved.
Austria 2002: The Team Order That Broke the Fans
At the 2002 Austrian Grand Prix, Ferrari’s Rubens Barrichello had claimed pole position and led the race comfortably from start to finish, unchallenged for the entire distance. On the final lap, with the checkered flag in sight, Ferrari instructed Barrichello over the radio to let his teammate Michael Schumacher pass and take the win instead. Barrichello initially refused, holding his position for several corners, before ultimately relenting and letting Schumacher through right at the final corner of the final lap. The decision baffled almost everyone watching. Schumacher already held a commanding 21 point lead in the championship at that point in the season, having won four of the first five races, making the order look not just unfair but completely unnecessary. The backlash was immediate and loud enough that it directly led to a rule change. On October 28, 2002, the FIA formally banned team orders that interfere with race results, a rule that stayed in place until 2011.
Multi 21: When a Driver Simply Said No
By 2013, the explicit ban on team orders had been lifted, but teams generally still avoided being too obvious about it, often using coded language over team radio instead of direct instructions. At the Malaysian Grand Prix that year, Red Bull gave its drivers, Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber, the instruction Multi 21, code for holding position with car number two, Webber, staying ahead of car number one, Vettel. Vettel, still frustrated from an incident with Webber during the previous year’s championship battle in Brazil, ignored the instruction entirely and passed Webber on track to take the win himself. It was a rare and startling moment, a driver publicly defying a direct team instruction in real time, on camera, with no ambiguity about what had happened. The fallout inside Red Bull was significant, straining the relationship between the two drivers for the remainder of their time as teammates.
Why Team Orders Never Really Went Away
Even during the years when explicit team orders were technically banned, teams found ways around the rule using strategy calls, pit stop timing, and fuel load decisions that produced the same outcome without anyone saying the words out loud. Since the rule was lifted in 2011, team orders have become an accepted, if still controversial, part of how races are managed whenever a driver is mathematically out of championship contention while their teammate is still fighting for the title. Fans and commentators still react strongly whenever these moments happen in the open, which says something about how much the sport’s audience still wants to believe in the fair fight, even when the numbers and history say otherwise.
What This Reveals About the Sport
Team orders exist because Formula 1 is, underneath the individual glory, a team sport with a shared budget, shared engineering resources, and a shared championship prize that both drivers contribute to regardless of who wins on a given Sunday. That structure makes some level of coordination inevitable, and the moments that become scandals are usually not the coordination itself but the timing and transparency of it, a team handing a win away on the final corner of the final lap being received very differently than a team quietly managing pit stop strategy three races before a championship is decided.
Why We Wrote This
This is the fourth entry in our F1 Myths and Madness series, following whether an F1 car could drive upside down, Crashgate, and Spygate. For the full picture of how the sport works, start with our complete guide to everything you need to know about F1. Learn more on our Brand Guidelines page, or read about what Wolvra stands for on our About Us page.