On July 25th, motor racing fans worldwide got two separate doses of being treated like know-nothing idiots by the captain of the Ferrari Formula 1 team and the man who essentially runs IndyCar.
It’s no secret that there are plenty of behind-the-scenes dealings in all forms of racing, from the under-10 set starting out in go-karts to NASCAR, IndyCar, F1 and every other major racing series in the world.
And of course flat-out cheating has been part of racing since the first two cars met on some dirt road.
“If you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t racin’” is heard in the NASCAR garages, usually being said by someone who knows a thing or to about getting away with trickery in that sport.
Four-time NASCAR champion Jimmie Johnson's team has been accused of cheating
In NASCAR, in particular, there’s something known generically as “the call.” What that meant, whether delivered by phone or in person, was that NASCAR wouldn’t be looking too closely at that team’s race cars when they went through NASCAR pre- and post-race inspections. This was reportedly one of the ways NASCAR has been able to have so many dramatic finishes where, as in “professional” wrestling, sometimes the fan favorite wins and sometimes the most-hated driver is victorious.
While “the call” or some form of it certainly exists in other motorsports, all series see a lot of stunts means to affect the outcome of the race. For instance, drivers have been known to, under orders from their crew chief or owner, stop their cars on the track or even crash them, in order to bring out a yellow flag which bunches up the competitors, allowing a front-running teammate in better to have a better shot at a win.
And throwing all sorts of stuff out of windows or cockpits (usually balled-up duct tape) in order to bring out the yellow flag is also a well-known trick meant to affect the race’s end.
And we won’t even cover the hundreds of cheating tricks used on engines, wings, suspensions and every other part of a race car which can be fiddled with, adjusted, lightened or moved for extra performance. “Add lightness” is the creed of the racing crew chief.
“It ain’t cheatin’ if you don’t get caught” is another oft-heard garage-area refrain.
As far back as 1934 (and no doubt even before), race winners were being “chosen” by someone outside the car rather than decided by actual on-track competition.
Daimler (whose cars now know as Mercedes-Benz) introduced their phenomenal “Silver Arrows” open-wheel race cars that year.
One of the very few extant Daimler W125 Silver Arrows
Why the Silver Arrow sobriquet? Legend has it that the race cars were slightly overweight, so team manager Alfred Neubauer ordered the team to strip all the paint off the cars. After that exercise, the cars met the weight limit and of course they were the color of their sheet metal; hence, the Silver Arrows.
During a major race that season during the Golden Age of Grand Prix racing, the two factory-sponsored Silver Arrows were blowing away the competition, specifically the AutoUnion cars (a company we now know as Audi).
Manfred von Brauchitsh and Luigi Fagioli were piloting the two Silver Arrows to a one-two finish, with Fagioli in the lead. It seemed his win for certain.
Towards the end of the race, “team orders,” from Neubauer himself, were given to Fagioli. The message? Let von Brauchitsh win.
The Italian Fagioli was so angry that not only did he allow the German to pass him, he stopped his car on the track, abandoned it and walked away.
Why was Fagioli given those orders? In those years, Hitler was determined to have Germany number one in every sport, especially racing, which was a huge draw and even more nationalistic and jingoistic than it is today. We can conclude that Neubauer knew it was best for everyone involved if a German, not an Italian, win the event.
One might think those days were gone with the advent of so much money in racing and so much attention paid to it worldwide.
Yet, two weekends ago at, appropriately, the German Grand Prix at Hockenheim, it was two Ferraris, not Mercedes, in the lead and it looked like a one-two finish for the fiery red Italian cars was inevitable.
Driving one Ferrari, which was in the lead, was Felipe Massa. Last season, during qualifying for the Hungarian Grand Prix,
And now he was in the lead of the German Grand Prix, exactly one year to the day after he suffered his horrific injury.
Felipe Massa in his Ferrari at an earlier Australian Grand Prix
His teammate, Fernando Alonso, a former World Driving Champion, was making good time on the track, too, but was being held up in slower traffic. Alonso eventually moved into second place behind his teammate.
With the end of the race nearly in sight, Ferrari engineer Rod Smedley got on the radio to
What that message meant was that
And neither were the stewards and other overseers of F1 competition. Team orders, after all, are simply not allowed in the rarefied air of F1 (wink, wink).
Since the incident two weeks ago, Ferrari was fined $100,000 for breaking Sporting Regulations and the matter was referred to the FIA World Motor Sport Council, which controls F1.
By the way, that council is currently headed by Jean Todt --- who for years ran the Ferrari F1 team as its executive director and CEO.
So we shall see how this former Ferrari official rules when it comes to passing judgment on “his” team. Don’t expect too much; $100K is nothing to F1 teams, several of which have annual budgets, believe it or not, approaching $500 million.
The other terrible call in a major racing series on July 25th came from Brian Barnhart, IndyCar’s top official, at a temporary road racing circuit run on an airport in
As seems to be the normal state of things for this season in IndyCar, cars from Team Penske and the Target Chip Ganassi team were leading the race. With two laps to go, Penske’s Helio Castroneves flew down the main straight which becomes a flat and fairly wide right-hand corner.
Ganassi’s Scott Dixon was behind Castroneves, he followed by Penske’s Will Power (great name for a racer; like Scott Speed, ex-F1 and now in NASCAR), Ganassi’s Dario Franchitti and another Penske car, driven by Ryan Briscoe.
Castroneves headed down the main straight which leads to turn one, the big sweeping right-hander. On the straight, he moved to the left not only to set himself up for the upcoming right, but also to become something of an obstacle to the car behind him driven by his teammate, Will Power.
Penske teammates Helio Castroneves and Ryan Briscoe in the pits at Motegi, Japan
The two went through the corner as Franchitti and Briscoe, behind the two leading cars, were going for broke towards the next right-hander, close to Castroneves and Power. With just two laps left, there was some great racing going on.
Then, TV viewers heard the announcers say that IndyCar was black-flagging leader Castroneves, ordering him to do a pit lane drive through. The reason? They said he had blocked his own teammate, Will Power, in an illegal fashion.
Castroneves, told this information via radio, wisely decided to stay on the track and took the checkered flag in the winning position. Within a few minutes, he was told that he would not get the win, that it would go to the driver who eventually finished in second place, Scott Dixon.
Castroneves, usually a very cool, calm and collected guy, went bonkers. He was grabbing officials and security people by their collars, screaming at anyone within earshot. When he grabbed IndyCar’s chief security officer, a gentleman who appears more than twice Castroneves’ size, things finally started to calm down.
Race chief steward Brian Barnhart, who is president of competition and racing operations for the sanctioning body, had just made one of the dumbest decisions ever seen in racing. Taking a win away for cheating or some other technicality even well after a race is one thing; doing that when there appeared to be no infraction whatsoever is the kind of thing which makes fans and sponsors leave the sport because it seems so unprofessional.
Castroneves was scored as finishing in tenth place by officials.
On Monday, those same officials fined driver Castroneves $60,000 and placed him on probation for the remainder of the season for his actions during the race and “unsportsmanlike conduct” afterwards.
But that’s not the whole story. At the start of the race, the first lap, as the cars headed for that same right-hander, Will Power led the pack with Castroneves to his left rear, and Power made exactly the same move which later would cost Castroneves the race, forcing teammate Castroneves farther off the best racing line and keep himself in front. The exact same move (video doesn’t lie).
In the world of cars, it’s often said that “there’s nothing new, just different ways of doing things which have been done before,” and for the most part that holds true for the car industry as a whole and certainly for racing. There have been cheating and stupid calls and decisions by officials which have cost drivers race wins and, some would say, on occasion lead them to serious injury and perhaps the loss of their lives.
And so it continues. But to see it in two races on the same weekend, in the world’s top two open-wheel series, and for it all to be so painfully obvious, is something which we can only hope will change with time.
But I wouldn’t bet on it.
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