WhiteBlue wrote:Actually having thought a little bit more about the whole business I now think that Red Bull definitely issued a team order to their drivers although they would never admit it.
That much is absolutely certain. The fact that Marko is quite clearly at the centre of that team order is extremely suspicious. He shouldn't be involved in running the team. Anyone would think he was Team Principal. Even in my own day-to-day job I am extremely wary of any spare part in the line of communication who doesn't have a clearly defined role and always seems to create confusion and misinformation. Not only is this very dangerous in a public PR-oriented environment like Red Bull Racing but it tends to create arguments about nothing internally.
I also think that the reason for the order might have simply been that Vettel was the faster of the two Red Bull drivers in Turkey and Horner knew it. It would make more sense than Marko and Mateschitz trying to screw Webber in favor of Vettel.
If that was truly the case then all the talking should have come from Horner and not Marko, and Horner has continually changed his story to fit Marko's. Until Vettel started turning his engine up he didn't look faster than Webber and the cars were more or less holding station. It's an incredibly stupid thing to do when your nearest rivals are a few tenths behind. So Vettel had a problem in qualifying? Stuff happens. He wasn't going to win the championship in one day.
I don't particularly rate Webber as a driver but there's no way I would jeopardise a one-two finish in any order with rivals as close as they were.
This theory would explain why team order was issued in the first place. It was simply an optimization to get Vettel past Webber and into clean air and avoid the risk of eventually loosing the lead to Hamilton.
Vettel was never under any threat from Hamilton whatsoever, and hadn't been for the nineteen odd laps that he'd been ahead. They were all lapping similarly and the gaps had stayed the same. Marko is talking bollocks.
Since I believe that the two Red Bulls were both in a fuel saving mode, since their lap times were similar and comparable to each other and Hamilton's for a long time and then Vettel had a spike, I believe both Red Bulls could have turned their engines up later once they'd conserved enough fuel and pulled comfortably away. However, only Vettel did so. This 'Mark turned on fuel saving mode' and Vettel saving one miserly kilo of fuel stuff so he didn't doesn't add up and isn't reflected in the lap times.
If this was the case then Mark's lap times would have slowed putting himself at risk from Hamilton, and Vettel's lap times would have stayed the same and he would have been faster that way dragging Hamilton along with him. That isn't what happened. None of it adds up.
The more Marko talks the more it becomes clear that indeed a team order was issued which did not reach Webber and screwed the situation up for all parties. Now of course everybody is denying but Marko is doing it so badly that it becomes crystal clear what happened.
still based around the premise that Marko latched on to of Vettel being under threat from Hamilton:
