{"id":15869,"date":"2012-04-23T06:52:29","date_gmt":"2012-04-23T10:52:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/?p=15869"},"modified":"2012-04-23T06:52:29","modified_gmt":"2012-04-23T10:52:29","slug":"lotus-not-sorry-after-skipping-team-order","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/formula-1\/lotus-not-sorry-after-skipping-team-order\/","title":{"rendered":"Lotus not sorry after skipping team order"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lotus did not consider employing team orders in order to boost Kimi Raikkonen’s chances of winning the Bahrain grand prix.<\/p>\n

\"Kimi-Raikkonen\"The 2007 world champion ultimately finished second and even had a stab at overtaking winner Sebastian Vettel.<\/p>\n

And he might have had an ever better chance at challenging the Red Bull had his Lotus team chiefs ordered teammate Romain Grosjean aside at a crucial moment.<\/p>\n

“Yeah,” confirmed Finn Raikkonen, “but there are no team orders and we know the rules.<\/p>\n

“I tried to get past as quickly as I can but it’s not easy with two similar cars.<\/p>\n

“It’s always easy to say afterwards ‘if we had done that’ but in the end we were not fast enough to win and we have to take the second,” he added.<\/p>\n

Despite team orders being effectively legal in F1, team boss Eric Boullier confirmed that Lotus does not follow that policy.<\/p>\n

“We don’t want to play team orders, so we let them race normally and what happened, happened,” he is quoted by the Mirror.<\/p>\n

The most important thing, according to Spanish commentator and former veteran F1 engineer Joan Villadelprat, is that the former Renault team still knows how to win.<\/p>\n

“Maybe they don’t have the best car on the grid, because McLaren and Red Bull and Mercedes are probably better, but Lotus have made a car capable of competing with the best in the right circumstances,” he wrote in El Pais newspaper.<\/p>\n

\u00a9 RIF | GMM<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lotus did not consider employing team orders in order to boost Kimi Raikkonen’s chances of winning the Bahrain grand prix. The 2007 world champion ultimately finished second and even had a stab at overtaking winner Sebastian Vettel. And he might have had an ever better chance at challenging the Red Bull had his Lotus team …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[3],"tags":[864,5262,5340,152,306,295],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15869"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15869"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15869\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15870,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15869\/revisions\/15870"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}