Team orders have always been a part of Formula One, and many teams have had a Number Two driver making his way for the Number One. But there is a significant difference between the past actions and the execution of Ferrari's decision in the Austrian Grand Prix: as the song goes, 'it ain't what ya do, it's the way that ya do it'... Doug Nye puts some perspective into the Ferrari Affair, and hears from former WC Phil Hill just how it should be done

Goodness me, such a fuss. But is it justified? Many younger, perhaps inevitably somewhat inexperienced Formula One enthusiasts have been tottering around slack-jawed, glassy-eyed, since last Sunday's closing seconds of the Austrian Grand Prix.

Quite understandably, they are feeling stunned, dismayed, cheated by the Ferrari management tactics which 'forced' Rubens Barrichello to shut-off within sniffing distance of what should have been his hard-earned chequered flag, and enable his favoured teammate Michael Schumacher to take another apparently much-needed victory and the ten precious World Championship points riding with it.

It's no good gasping 'but it ruins the sport', for such remarks alone demonstrate inadequate understanding of what major-league motor racing 'as a sport' has ever been all about.

Neither are there any valid grounds for castigating 'team orders' as if they are something new.

They are not. They have habitually been used and variably enforced since the beginning of Grand Prix racing in 1906 - and even then they were already well-established - and so nothing whatsoever has changed there.

But the chilling factor this time round is that it is plainly not 'just' those younger, perhaps somewhat inexperienced Formula One enthusiasts who have been repelled.

Enthusiasts of all ages, and all degrees of interest and involvement, have been equally, deeply, genuinely offended.

And perhaps the reason for what to Ferrari seems to be such evidently unexpected offence being taken - even amongst those equipped to understand the full circumstances surrounding their core decision - is rather more the manner of its execution, rather than the core decision itself, irredeemably irresponsible though it might have been.

You see, the circumstances of what happened in Austria and the manoeuvrings witnessed by the paying spectators and Formula One's worldwide TV audience alike, were something quite beyond all our experience - ancient and modern alike.

I can think of no direct precedent given the same set of circumstances - the same stage of the season, the same Championship considerations, the same contemporarily fragile state of health of Formula One itself... At a time when Ferrari demonstrably enjoys utter domination - and Formula One World Championship racing demonstrably needs all the friends it can get since it presently offers such pitiful entertainment value - some of the pillars sustaining it have been heedlessly demolished...

Who has ever heard before of Ferrari fans ceremonially burning their flags after a 1-2 race win?

Worldwide reaction to Ferrari's decision has shown staggering unanimity in condemning Ferrari, its executives, and to a considerable degree its drivers.

I have heard drivers and team chiefs and FIA and FISA and FOCA executives all enthusiastically booed before, and sometimes with considerable venom. But I am told by those who were present at the A1-Ring that this was something else, and it certainly sounded so on the TV and radio effects microphones. This was the extended, incensed, infuriated jeering of a crowd who felt not so much that one of its heroes had been cheated, or short-changed, but that 'somebody' over there in the pit complex had cheated and short-changed each and every one of those spectators personally.

The hugely adverse reaction of press and public alike, mirrors such distaste - Ferrari's action has plainly caused the deepest and most widespread offence I can ever recall in motor sport. I doubt there is a modern precedent for such a reaction, and can think of none from the past that properly matches it.

Of course there are excellent reasons for the lack of precedent from long-bygone times; not least the lack of 'live' media coverage on the modern scale for any motor race probably pre-mid 1970s. Ferrari apologists could argue that there is in fact no precedent for this season's unique set of circumstances, since no Formula One team and driver has ever been shooting to equal Fangio's unique career record of having won five World Championship titles, and I would not seek to dissuade the individual reader from judging the merit of that defence either way. Perhaps such a factor was even more important on the eve of Fiat's announcement that the Ferrari company is to be floated publicly at the end of this year?

Jean Todt, Ross Brawn and President Luca di Montezemolo himself have aggressively protested the importance of their brilliant senior driver accumulating the maximum number of points when they may be within his grasp, as insurance against future failures, and again it is for the individual fan and follower to judge the merit of such cool and logical reasoning.

But - and there is a colossal but - in all this, I am sure that the current furore would have been foreseeable for these executives given current circumstances - if Todt, Brawn and anybody else in a position of responsibility within the Fiat/Ferrari complex had merely had the commonsense to look beyond their own particular enclosed bubble of existence... And of the top three, Luca di Montezemolo - famed for his fleeting attention span - should have the most free time for such broad-spectrum corporate awareness, or perhaps he thinks he pays Todt to perform that function?

'The bubble' is a phenomenon common to any intense, critically all-absorbing human activity. Short of open warfare it probably exists in its most intense form today in the white-hot crucible of Formula One. Focused to a fine point of Ferrari self-interest, the likes of Todt and Brawn - the hands-on men - standing at the tiller 25 hours each day, eight days each week, cannot be broad-spectrum men of vision.

In his role, Todt plainly ought to be - but on last Sunday's evidence it seems he plainly falls short.

Brawn the engineer we should perhaps disqualify from blame. As the accomplished engineer and fine tactician that he obviously is, he will not have that part of the intellectual chip installed which permits broad-spectrum thinking. I doubt he's capable of considering "how will this look" when his perceived objective is a logical route towards "how will this succeed"... The logical bald route to a logical bald objective is often defensible only in terms of bald logic - but the lack of broader thought, of consideration for the public response to any action, has plainly scored what is perhaps motor racing's most spectacular public relations own-goal of all time.

It would be for Todt and di Montezemolo - and perhaps for others more senior within the parent Fiat hierarchy - to have set the year's policy, and to judge how far to go, how much to push the envelope, to set their own practical and perhaps ethical standards, relative to protecting the greater good of their company, their activity, and the multiple World Championship titles which they (and their German driver) so obviously crave.

One great bygone strength of Ferrari - if also often a cataclysmic weakness - was team founder Mr Ferrari's absence from the race circuits of the world. He ruled by remote control from his offices in Modena and Maranello and in his converted farmhouse at Fiorano. But while he was encapsulated within his self-imposed bubble of Emilia, he was an avid observer of world trends, contemporary atmosphere, developing dangers, and he was hugely aware of public perception, and media attitudes. His son, Piero Lardi, has gone in to bat for Ferrari's modern management, assuring us that The Old Man would have made the same decision as they did last week.

I have absolutely no problem with that, but it's not what you do, it's the way that you do it.

The worldly-wise Old Man had acutely sensitive political antennae. I have absolutely no doubt - after years of Ferrari study and research and rubbing shoulders with people close to him, and not least from interviews with the man himself - that while in all probability he would indeed have ensured that Schumacher was favoured in Austria, he would also have had the wisdom to gauge today's pressures and sensitivities - he would have appreciated how thin the ice lies beneath Formula One today - and he would have instructed that La Ferrari's performance in Austria should be made 'to look good' - not at all like the fan-repelling, clinically cynical travesty of sporting virtues (to which The Old Man at least paid lip-service) that his successors so inconsiderately staged last Sunday.

So if we accept that such a deed might be considered simply 'business as normal', on whose doorstep should blame fall for making it look so irredeemably bad?

I have seen no convincing evidence yet to confirm precisely at what stage the decision was made to instruct Barrichello to throw the race, and when that instruction was transmitted. But if it was not made pre-race, and not made until the last lap, then the responsibility for it looking as bad as it did lies plainly with the pit-end of the radio conversation.

However, if Barrichello had more than, say, a couple of laps of warning of what he was supposed to do...then the responsibility for making it look so bad must plainly lie not with his management, but with him...

With the benefit of that much warning he could - and perhaps should - have rolled off the pace earlier, perhaps have taken it upon himself to have wagged the tail out of the slow second corner - cue commentator "Wow - big slide there, can Rubens's tyres be going off, has he pushed too hard earlier? Here's Michael closing, he's conserved his tyres, he's done it again...another brilliant drive...poor, poor Rubinho...". And until a future Doug Nye perhaps is sitting having coffee and reminiscing with the 70-year old retired and inevitably overweight Brazilian we would perhaps never know that he'd been acting under instruction to let his teammate/leader win in Austria 2002.

And then there's the Schumacher side. He had a stop pedal as well as a go pedal - he didn't use it, he punched the air to greet another 'victory'. And then later, having heard the jeers and boos, he declared he did not like the decision. For many he confirmed that while he may be, indeed, a truly brilliant racing driver, as a properly developed man he still remains woefully deficient...

So what could have been done, and how, to achieve the same end? It's not enough for Todt and Brawn to say bluntly that any other sequence of events would have been a dishonest sham. As a former F1 driver who called me said "Jeez - dishonest sham, that's what much of Formula One has been all about for years! We know that, they know that, most of the fans should know that...but none of us want our noses rubbed in it...!".

On paper, Michael Schumacher already has four World titles to his name - two of them with Ferrari. Now he's poised for a hat-trick with them. Only Juan Manuel Fangio has ever taken a hat-trick of titles and only he has won more overall, five - in 1951, and 1954-5-6-7 consecutively. And then when he retired from full-time participation for the 1958 season, Ferrari became deeply involved in the battle of succession - this time with the British driver Mike Hawthorn as their de facto team leader.

And this is where a critical perspective clicks in. I won't bore you here with the story of that Formula One year, beyond describing it as a season-long duel between Ferrari and the British Vanwall team, Hawthorn and Peter Collins the lead drivers for the Italian team, Stirling Moss and Tony Brooks leading Vanwall's charge. Of course team orders came into play - by Ferrari - as the Championship chase neared its climax, and then (un-encouraged by modern pits to driver two-way radio links) the players demonstrated how to do it properly...as The Old Man would have expected of them.

It came down to the last two World Championship rounds - the Italian GP at Monza, and the Moroccan GP at Casablanca. A tragic twist had been added by the deaths of two Ferrari drivers mid-season - Luigi Musso at Reims in the French GP and Peter Collins at Nurburgring in the German. There, in Germany, a works Ferrari sports car star named Phil Hill ran the team's F2 entry in the 1500cc class run concurrently with the big 2½-litre F1 cars' Grand Prix. With Ferrari robbed of Musso and Collins, Phil was then given his big Formula One chance in a full 2½-litre car alongside Hawthorn at Monza.

And there, in his first proper Grand Prix drive, he shone, as he would recall:

"I got off to a good start, and led the race for the first four or five laps until Mike Hawthorn came by and then we ran first and second quite comfortably until I got a flat tyre and I went straight into the pits unexpectedly to change it. Back out I was able to make up a lot of ground..." - he smashed the lap record - "...and then because I was out of sequence on the pit stops, I regained the lead when Mike made his scheduled stop. That changed around when I stopped again and Mike led from Tony Brooks's Vanwall, then me. But Mike's clutch began to slip...

"Our team manager, Tavoni, was putting out a signal board saying 'BRO' for Brooks and a time on it, so I thought Brooks was catching me, and I speeded up. In fact he was leading - he'd passed Mike - and my added pace now meant that I was catching Mike too. I came right up on his tail and suddenly he saw me and this green arm shot out..." - Hawthorn was driving in his favoured green wind-cheater - "...and waved me back.

"Then Tavoni signalled 'HAW-HIL' so I realised what was required."

And here's the crucial passage, as Phil recalls:

"I thought I shouldn't make backing-off too obvious.

"So I flicked the ignition off and on, making the engine pop, splutter, BANG!, then run clean again. That way I just drifted back from Mike and his second place became safe and his Championship hopes against Moss were kept alive - ready for the decider about a month later at Casablanca..."

Between Monza and Morocco, he recounts: "We obviously all discussed the Championship situation and possible scenarios for this deciding race, and it was agreed that Mike should concentrate on being there at the finish, while if I had the opportunity I should mix it with the Vanwalls and as far as possible try to push them into breaking their cars...

"Well, I took off from the second row and just about busted my ass trying to get ahead of Moss!

"We were side by side past the pits ending the first lap and the Vanwall's disc brakes were plainly going to outlast my Ferrari's drums, and they did..." - so that on lap 3 - "...trying my darndest to outbrake Moss, those drum brakes just faded away and I went shooting up an escape road."

Phil rejoined fourth, really fired up by this time, and in just four more laps he had slashed his way back into second place, ahead of Championship-challenger Hawthorn, but there was nothing he could do about Moss in the leading Vanwall: "Stirling was just uncatchable...".

After 25 laps Moss was 20 seconds ahead of Phil's Ferrari, Tony Brooks had displaced Hawthorn for third, but Mike soon moved ahead again to make it Ferrari running 2-3 behind Moss in the Vanwall. Should they finish in this order Moss would be Champion in succession to Fangio - as most expected and thought right and proper - with Hawthorn runner-up.

But after lap 40 of the scheduled 58 laps it was plain that Phil was too far behind Moss to pressure him into breaking anything or making a mistake. So team manager Tavoni held out the 'HAW-HIL' signal board, specifying the required finishing order.

Phil: "There was still quite a way to go. After Monza, and now running second to Moss for so long here in Morocco I was a little bit more confident that I was unlikely to be fired instantly, so I just barely backed off. And after a couple of laps when I was still ahead of Mike, and Tavoni had been waving that same signal board ever more urgently at me, he began waving his finger like a schoolmaster - then after another lap I came by and there he was in the pit lane, down on his knees in a praying position; kinda 'Pheel, per-lease, izza my job at stake here!', and I just kinda had to chuckle and I rolled it off... But again we managed to swap places little by little - so it did not look too contrived, to the crowd at least..."

And Moss led throughout, won and set fastest lap but still lost the Championship by one point to Mike Hawthorn, of Ferrari...notch major triumph for Maranello.

There have been many other occasions since, several indeed in every single season, of team orders properly coming into play - and not always right at the end of the year, with what to me and others like me is this madly overrated Drivers' Championship crucially at stake.

But consider now our Ferrari hierarchy in their blinkered, terribly pressured, narrow-spectrum bubbles of existence - there on the pit wall and there in those two cars...and consider the psychology of the talented racing driver worth his salt.

There's a line I remember straight from the mouth of one multiple Grand Prix winner who has been there, done it and experienced it all: "It's very important to a racing driver to feel that he gets full credit for a drive well done. That really conflicts with any notion of backing off to throw away a lead well won..."

Perhaps little Barrichello was making his point, indelibly, to ensure himself full credit - short of winning - for such a drive well done? And by so doing he detonated a dirtier bomb than anyone could have predicted...for its fall-out has already been immense, and should plainly be descending for many weeks to come.

It could so easily have been made to look seamless - to look natural - to look 'professional' to those with the wit to recognise a planned manoeuvre for what it really was. Ferrari could so easily have been enjoying right now another wonderful 1-2 in Austria, a joy day for the likable Barrichello, a nice steady points earner for their four-time World Champion...or enjoying a 1-2 with the German triumphant, the Brazilian yet again unlucky but consoled by 2nd place...

Instead it came across as a clumsy, mindless, needless and entirely disreputable kick in the ribs for Formula One at a time when in fact this class of 'racing' is already on its back, haemorrhaging public interest, support and sympathy - most critically, even from the long converted faithful. Perhaps until last weekend too few of the Formula One glitterati within their individual bubbles would acknowledge how poor the product has actually become. Now that they have someone else to blame, perhaps reality will finally have dawned...

The old song went: "It ain't what ya do - it's the way that ya do it...That's what gets results". Self-evidently, both positive...and negative. And at Ferrari, right now, somebody deserves a slap.