Felipe Massa will be told what Williams “expects” him to do when instructions are issued during subsequent grands prix.<\/p>\n
As ever in formula one, ‘team orders’ is not something teams even like to admit to doing.<\/p>\n
“How could we do what to Felipe?” deputy boss Claire Williams responded to a question from British television Sky after the Malaysian grand prix.<\/p>\n
At Sepang, Brazilian Massa at least twice ignored radio calls to let his teammate Valtteri Bottas pass him for seventh place.<\/p>\n
One of the calls – “Valtteri is faster than you” – was almost eerily identical to Ferrari’s infamous ‘Fernando (Alonso) is faster than you’ of Hockenheim 2010.<\/p>\n
But Claire Williams initially tried to deny it was actually an order.<\/p>\n
“At the end of the day, Felipe finished ahead of Valtteri,” she insisted.\u00a0 “They were both told to cool it.”<\/p>\n
Asked if the team would be rebuking Massa, Williams added: “I’m going home now.\u00a0 That’s me done for the day.”<\/p>\n
It was chief engineer Rod Nelson who had to acknowledge that Massa “didn’t do what we would have preferred him to do” as Grove based Williams pursued the sixth-placed Jenson Button’s extra points.<\/p>\n
“The facts are we felt that Valtteri stood quite a good chance of getting past Button because his tyres were about five laps younger,” Nelson said at Sepang.<\/p>\n
He explained that the radio calls were not made because Massa is once again being shuffled into an old Ferrari-like ‘number 2’ role.<\/p>\n
“There’s nothing else going on in the background,” Nelson insisted.\u00a0 “We don’t run like that — it’s not like other teams where they have a number 1 driver and a number 2 driver.\u00a0 We’ve got two number one drivers.”<\/p>\n
He said the idea was simply to give Bottas “a go” at passing Button, and if he failed to do it, “we would have swapped our drivers over again”.<\/p>\n
“We will go through it with the drivers and discuss what we expect,” said Nelson.<\/p>\n
Toni Vilander, a Finnish racing driver and pundit for MTV3 television, said he thinks Massa should have obeyed the order.<\/p>\n
“When a team asks, the driver should invariably follow,” he said.<\/p>\n
“I think Massa should perhaps have swallowed his pride and let Valtteri through,” he added.<\/p>\n
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