Vettel’s distinction, as F1’s youngest three-time champion, is self-evident,
and yet his actions in Kuala Lumpur offered a telling demonstration of
driver power. He has also refused to be contrite here in China, even
acknowledging that he would be prepared to deny Webber a win in the same
situation. Pressed on Mateschitz’s view of the incident, Horner said:
“Dietrich is a purist. Red Bull is supposed to be all about elite, extreme
sport, and competition between athletes. He, more than anyone, wants to see
the type of wheel-to-wheel racing that happened between Sebastian and Mark.
But the conflict you have from a constructors’ point of view is that you
want to bank the 43 points for first and second place.”
Desperate to douse the controversy before the third race of the campaign
tomorrow, Horner said of the disobedient Vettel: “I have a choice – do I
fire him, suspend him or penalise him, or do I say: ‘OK, I accept your
apology, learn from it,’ and we move on? Fundamentally, what we want is to
trust the drivers to race one another. Whenever we try to apply control in
the latter stages, whether it be Sebastian in Malaysia or Mark at
Silverstone in 2011, they take things more into their hands. The racer DNA
within them is greater than the desire to act as a team player at that point
in time.”
So, as director of motorsport Helmut Marko suggested this week, team orders at
Red Bull seem to belong already to the past. The same looks to be true at Mercedes,
after Ross Brawn forcefully told Nico Rosberg not to overtake Lewis Hamilton
amid the frantic denouement in Kuala Lumpur. Chairman Niki Lauda told German
television station RTL: “We have had a meeting since, and we decided that
with immediate effect the drivers would be able to race each other.”
With Red Bull and Mercedes jostling for early-season supremacy, it was Ferrari
who established the pace yesterday. In a surprising reversal of the Scuderia
hierarchy, Felipe Massa, who set the fastest time in the second practice
session, could become the first team-mate of Fernando Alonso for 11 years to
out-qualify Spain’s double world champion for five consecutive grands prix.