F1 Team Orders Explained: Rules, the Ban and Famous Cases
Team orders in F1 explained for British fans: why they are legal, the 2003 to 2010 ban, Multi 21, papaya rules and the cases from Aintree to Monza.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Formula 1 Explained25 min read
- Ban introduced
- 2003 season
- Ban removed
- 2011 season
- Ferrari fine after Austria 2002
- $1 million
- Ferrari fine after Germany 2010
- $100,000
Aintree, 16 July 1955. Stirling Moss came out of the last corner of the British Grand Prix a car's length ahead of Juan Manuel Fangio in an identical silver Mercedes and won by two tenths of a second. It was his first world championship victory, and the first time a British driver had won the home race. He asked Fangio afterwards whether he had been allowed to win. Fangio, by Moss's account, would say only that it had been his day. Moss died in 2020 without ever finding out.
Whatever happened on Merseyside that afternoon was legal then and would be legal now. Team orders are permitted in Formula 1. A team may tell a driver to give up a place, to hold position, or to stay behind a team-mate, and the FIA's Sporting Regulations contain no rule against it. A specific ban existed from 2003 to 2010 and was dropped because it could not be enforced. What remains are the general provisions of the International Sporting Code against bringing the sport into disrepute and against fixing a result, which catch a deliberate crash or a deal struck between two different teams, and nothing short of that.
What the rules allow and the two limits that remain
Read the Sporting Regulations from the first article to the last and the phrase "team orders" does not appear. That absence is the rule. The document governs how a car must be driven in relation to every other car on the track, and it takes no position on which of two cars from the same garage should be in front.
The reasoning goes back to how the championship defines a competitor. The entrant is the team. It holds the entry, pays the fee, employs the drivers and owns the cars, and the regulations treat it as a single participant fielding two machines. An instruction from the pit wall to one of its own drivers is, in the eyes of the code, an internal matter, in the same category as a decision about tyre pressures.
Two limits sit outside that. The first is the catch-all in the International Sporting Code, numbered Article 151(c) for most of the period this page covers and since moved within Article 12, which makes an offence of any fraudulent conduct or any act prejudicial to the interests of a competition or of motor sport generally. The second is harder to state as a clause and easier to recognise: a result manufactured by endangering people, by deceiving the officials, or by agreement between competitors who are supposed to be racing each other.
Everything in between is allowed, and the team is under no duty to announce what it is doing or to explain it afterwards. The FIA can listen to every radio channel. It cannot require a team to justify an instruction given to its own driver. A swap on the last lap is allowed. Holding a faster car behind a slower one for forty laps is allowed. Telling a driver three races into a season that he is there to support the other car is allowed, if unwise.
The stewards do have one residual interest. An order carried out dangerously, by braking on a straight for instance, is a driving offence like any other, and the panel will judge the manoeuvre without regard to why it was made. Who sits on that panel is explained in our guide to how F1's stewards and race director divide their powers.
Why a team issues an order in the first place
Two cars, one bank account. A team's income depends heavily on its position in the constructors' table, and that table adds both cars' points together, so from the pit wall a one-two is worth the same whichever driver leads it. The mechanics of that table are set out in our piece on how the constructors' championship is scored and paid. Taken alone, that arithmetic gives a team no reason to swap its drivers and every reason to stop them fighting.
The drivers' championship changes the sum. It is won by one person, and when only one of a team's drivers has a realistic chance of winning it, each point the other takes from him is a point given to a rival. The gap between first and second place in a Grand Prix is seven points. Between second and third it is three. Late in a tight season those are large numbers, and the team can move them from one car to the other with a sentence on the radio.
Then there is the plain cost of racing a team-mate. Two cars disputing a corner both run off the ideal line, both use more tyre, and both lose time to whoever is behind. On worn rubber late in a stint, a five-lap fight can hand a place to a third car that neither would otherwise have seen. And sometimes they hit each other. Red Bull's drivers collided when running first and second in Turkey in 2010. Mercedes lost both cars on the opening lap in Spain in 2016. Each of those afternoons produced, within days, a new set of internal instructions.
So a team has three separate motives, and they do not always point the same way: protect the combined score, help the title contender, avoid the accident. Most rows about team orders are really disagreements about which of the three applied.
The forms an order takes over the radio
The order everyone remembers is the swap. It is also the rarest. Far more often the instruction is to do nothing: stay where you are, do not attack, bring it home.
| Instruction | What the driver hears | What it achieves |
|---|---|---|
| Swap positions | "Let him through" or, in the ban years, a hint about relative pace | Moves points from one car to the other |
| Hold station | "Hold position", "maintain the gap" | Ends a fight and protects both cars' result |
| Release on a different strategy | "He is on fresher tyres, do not hold him up" | Lets the faster car chase those ahead |
| Give the place back | "If he cannot pass, we swap back" | Restores the original order when the chase fails |
| Pit-stop priority | Lead car is called in first, or offered the choice | Protects the leader from being undercut by his team-mate |
| The tow | Agreed before qualifying | One car punches a hole in the air for the other down a long straight |
| Defend for the other car | "Hold him up as long as you can" | Costs a rival time against the team-mate ahead |
The third and fourth rows travel together, and they are the form most likely to end in a quarrel. Hungary in 2017 is the textbook version done properly. Lewis Hamilton was stuck behind his Mercedes team-mate Valtteri Bottas and believed he could catch the Ferraris ahead. Bottas let him through on the understanding that the place would come back if the attack failed. It failed. At the last corner of the last lap Hamilton slowed and handed third place back, giving up three points in a season when he was fighting for the title.
Pit-stop priority is quieter and matters more over a season. By convention the car ahead on the road gets first call, because the driver who stops first usually gains from fresh tyres. A team that pits the second car first has, in effect, reversed its drivers without saying so, and two of the cases later on this page began exactly that way.
The tow belongs to Monza and a handful of other fast circuits. A car following another down a long straight gains time from the hole in the air, and teams agree in advance who gives and who receives. When two cars from one team each need it in the same session, somebody has to go without.
The vocabulary engineers use for all this, from "box" to "push now", is collected in our glossary of F1 radio and paddock terms.
Austria 2002: the swap on the line and the fine for the podium
Michael Schumacher had won four of the first five races of 2002 when the championship reached the A1-Ring on 12 May. Rubens Barrichello, in the other Ferrari, took pole position and led from the start. There was no contest for the title worth the name. Ferrari told him to give up the win regardless.
He complied as late and as visibly as it was possible to comply. Coming out of the final corner on the final lap he lifted, and Schumacher passed him in the last few yards to win by 0.182 seconds. The grandstands booed. On the podium Schumacher, plainly embarrassed, pushed Barrichello up onto the top step and handed him the winner's trophy.
It was the second year running. At the same circuit in 2001 Barrichello had been told to surrender second place to Schumacher at the last corner, and had done so.
What Ferrari was punished for
The World Motor Sport Council heard the case on 26 June 2002, and its decision is more interesting than its reputation. It fined Ferrari and its two drivers one million US dollars, half payable at once and half suspended for a year. The offence was the podium. The procedure for the ceremony is laid down in the regulations, the drivers had stood in the wrong places and passed the trophies about, and that was a breach.
On the swap itself the Council said it deplored the manner in which the order had been given and carried out, and that it could take no action. There was no rule to apply. Teams had been arranging finishes since before the championship existed.
Schumacher wrapped up the title in France in July with six races still to run, so the four points gained in Austria turned out to be worth nothing at all. Later that season, at Indianapolis, he slowed on the line in an apparent attempt at a staged dead heat and Barrichello crossed it first by 0.011 seconds. Whether that was a debt repaid or a misjudgement has never been settled between them.
The damage was to the audience's trust, and the FIA responded in the only way a rule-maker can. For 2003 it wrote a rule.
The ban years, 2003 to 2010, and why the rule could not be policed
The new clause was one sentence long: team orders which interfere with a race result are prohibited. By 2010 it sat in the Sporting Regulations as Article 39.1.
Its weakness was visible from the first reading. Every decision a team makes interferes with a race result. Choosing which car stops first, which gets the new front wing, which runs the lighter fuel load: all of it shapes the order at the flag, and none of it could sensibly be banned. So the rule could only ever catch an instruction that was explicit, audible and obviously aimed at reversing two cars on the track. Teams took the point within weeks and stopped being explicit.
What followed was eight seasons of euphemism. Drivers were told that a team-mate was "quicker" and left to draw the conclusion. Engineers asked for fuel to be saved at convenient moments. Pit stops were timed so that one car emerged ahead of the other without anyone having to lift on a straight.
The FIA tested the rule once in earnest before the case that broke it. At Monaco in 2007 McLaren's Lewis Hamilton, a rookie running second to Fernando Alonso, was told to hold position and hinted afterwards that he had been held back. The governing body investigated and cleared the team within days, concluding that it had been entitled to pursue the strategy most likely to secure a one-two at a circuit where overtaking is close to impossible. That ruling effectively conceded that "hold station" was not a team order in the prohibited sense.
Other cases passed without even an inquiry. In Brazil in 2007 Felipe Massa lost the lead to Kimi Räikkönen through the pit stops, and Räikkönen won the title that day. In China in 2008 Räikkönen slowed to let Massa into second, in full view, because Massa was the Ferrari driver still in the championship fight. Nobody was charged.
A rule that punishes only the clumsy is a rule against clumsiness.
- Melbourne, March 1998McLaren's drivers swap the lead under a pre-race agreement. The FIA warns that arranged results may be punished in future.
- Austria, May 2002Barrichello hands victory to Schumacher on the line. Ferrari is fined for the podium ceremony, not the swap.
- 2003 seasonA new rule prohibits team orders which interfere with a race result.
- Monaco, May 2007McLaren is investigated for holding Hamilton behind Alonso and is cleared.
- Germany, July 2010A coded message moves Massa aside for Alonso. The stewards fine Ferrari and refer the case upwards.
- Paris, September 2010The World Motor Sport Council upholds the fine, adds nothing, and orders the rule to be reviewed.
- 2011 seasonThe ban is deleted. The general disrepute clause remains.
The sequence of events and FIA decisions from the first modern controversy to the repeal. Dates are those of the races and Council meetings.
Germany 2010: "Fernando is faster than you"
Rob Smedley, a race engineer from Middlesbrough, had worked with Felipe Massa at Ferrari for four years by the afternoon of 25 July 2010. Massa was leading the German Grand Prix at Hockenheim, having got ahead at the start. Fernando Alonso was behind him, quicker, and the only Ferrari driver with a serious chance at the title.
Smedley came on the radio and spoke slowly, like a man reading out a statement he had not written. Fernando is faster than you. Can you confirm you understood that message.
Massa understood it. On lap 49 he was slow out of the hairpin and Alonso went by. Smedley's next transmission praised him for it and ended with the word sorry. The whole exchange went out on the world television feed.
The stewards fined Ferrari 100,000 US dollars that evening, the largest sum within their power, for breaching Article 39.1 and for bringing the sport into disrepute, and sent the matter to the World Motor Sport Council. Ferrari's defence was that no order had been given: Massa had been supplied with information and had made his own decision. It was an argument nobody was expected to believe, and its real function was to show that the rule turned on wording.
On 8 September the Council met in Paris. It upheld the fine. It added no further penalty. Alonso kept the win and both drivers kept their points. And it asked for Article 39.1 to be reviewed, which in the language of the FIA meant it was finished. The clause was removed for 2011, and teams were reminded in its place that the disrepute article still applied to anything they did.
The retreat was the right call. Eight years had shown that the ban did not stop orders. It only obliged teams to lie about them, and a sport in which engineers recite coded scripts for the benefit of the stewards is not more honest than one in which they say "let him through". What the 2010 decision did not do is make team orders popular, and it could not have.
Multi 21 and the limits of a team's authority
Legalising orders settled what a team could ask. It did nothing about whether the driver would listen. That became clear at Sepang on 24 March 2013, in the second race of the season.
After the final pit stops Mark Webber led Sebastian Vettel in a Red Bull one-two. The team sent both cars a coded instruction, Multi 21: car number 2, Webber's, to finish ahead of car number 1. Both were to turn their engines down and bring the cars home. Webber did. Vettel attacked instead, and on lap 46 of 56, after several corners side by side and a moment against the pit wall that could have removed both cars, he took the lead and kept it.
The team principal, Christian Horner, told him over the radio that this was silly. That was the extent of the enforcement. In the room behind the podium a furious Webber said the code back to him twice. Vettel apologised that evening and withdrew the apology three weeks later, saying he would probably do the same again.
Red Bull took no action against him, and could not realistically have done so. He was a three-time world champion in the best car on the grid. What does a team do to its most valuable asset for winning a race?
The other team order that afternoon
A few seconds behind, Mercedes ran the same play and got the opposite result. Hamilton, in third, was short of fuel and lapping slowly. Nico Rosberg was faster and asked more than once to be let past. Ross Brawn, the team principal, refused him by name. Rosberg stayed behind, finished fourth, and told the team over the radio to remember it.
Same race, same kind of instruction, two different outcomes. The difference was not the rule. A team order has exactly as much force as the driver's calculation of what disobeying will cost him, and that depends on his contract, his standing and how easily he could be replaced. For a driver in his first year with a new employer the cost is high. For a champion it is close to zero.
What happens to a driver who refuses a team order
Nothing, as far as the officials are concerned. An instruction from the pit wall is not a regulation, the stewards have no power to enforce it, and the classification records who crossed the line first without interest in who was meant to.
Whatever follows happens inside the team.
| Year and race | Driver | Instruction | What followed |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1981 Brazil, Jacarepaguá | Carlos Reutemann, Williams | Pit board telling him to let Alan Jones through | Won the race; relations with Jones never recovered; lost the title by a point |
| 1982 San Marino, Imola | Didier Pironi, Ferrari | A "slow" board, read by Gilles Villeneuve as hold position | Passed Villeneuve on the last lap to win; Villeneuve vowed not to speak to him again |
| 2011 Britain, Silverstone | Mark Webber, Red Bull | "Maintain the gap" behind Vettel | Kept attacking to the flag and said so afterwards; no sanction |
| 2013 Malaysia, Sepang | Sebastian Vettel, Red Bull | Multi 21 | Won the race; no sanction |
| 2016 Abu Dhabi | Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes | Speed up and stop backing the field into Rosberg | Won the race, lost the title; no sanction |
| 2022 São Paulo | Max Verstappen, Red Bull | Hand sixth place back to Sergio Pérez | Refused, citing reasons he had already given the team; no sanction |
The two oldest cases carry the most weight. Reutemann's contract with Williams was understood to make him the second driver, obliged to yield to Jones in defined circumstances. He ignored the board in the rain in Rio, won, and spent the rest of 1981 in a team whose lead driver would not help him. He lost the championship to Nelson Piquet by a single point at the final round.
Imola is darker. Ferrari's two cars were running alone at the front of a depleted field, and the pit hung out a board that Villeneuve took to mean the positions were frozen. Pironi took it to mean only that they should save the cars, and passed him on the last lap. Thirteen days later, still furious, Villeneuve was killed in qualifying at Zolder while trying to beat Pironi's time. No account of team orders that treats them purely as a question of points is complete.
Verstappen's refusal in Brazil in 2022 is the modern pattern. He had already secured the title. Pérez needed the two points for second in the standings and finished the year three short. Verstappen told the team on the radio not to ask him again, the team did not, and the matter was closed with a statement. A team's patience is the only penalty available, and with a driver of that value it is nearly unlimited.
Number one and number two drivers, written down and otherwise
In the 1950s nobody pretended. Until the end of 1957 the rules allowed a driver to take over a team-mate's car in the middle of a race and share the points, and a team's senior driver expected to be offered one if his own broke. At Monza in 1956 Peter Collins, from Kidderminster, was in contention for the world title himself when he came into the pits and handed his Ferrari to Fangio, whose car had failed. Fangio finished second in it and won the championship. Collins said he was young and had time. He was killed at the Nürburgring two years later.
Status became a contractual matter as the money grew. Ronnie Peterson returned to Lotus for 1978 on terms that made him second to Mario Andretti, and he kept to them, following Andretti home in four one-two finishes that year when he was often plainly able to pass. The story of that team is told in our history of Lotus in Formula 1. Ferrari in the Schumacher era ran on the same principle, with Eddie Irvine and then Barrichello hired in the knowledge of who came first, though the wording of those agreements has never been published and accounts of it differ.
Melbourne 1998 and the gentleman's agreement
McLaren, based in Woking, has generally preferred an arrangement between the drivers to a ranking imposed on them. At the opening race of 1998 its two cars were so far ahead of the field that they lapped everyone else, and Mika Häkkinen and David Coulthard had agreed beforehand that whoever led into the first corner would not be challenged by the other. Häkkinen led. Midway through the race he drove through the pit lane in response to a radio call he had misheard, and lost the lead. With a few laps left Coulthard slowed on the main straight and let him back past.
The Australian organisers complained that their race had been decided by arrangement. The World Motor Sport Council accepted that teams could manage their drivers in pursuit of a championship, and warned that anything it judged prejudicial to the competition would be punished under the disrepute clause. It was the first sign of the reaction that Austria would complete four years later.
Few teams admit to a hierarchy now. Two marketable drivers are worth more to sponsors than one and a helper, and a driver publicly labelled as support loses value the day it is said. When the Mercedes team principal called Bottas a "wingman" after a race in Hungary in 2018, Bottas objected to the word the same afternoon. The preferred formula is equal status until the mathematics intervene, which usually means equal status until about two-thirds of the way through the year.
McLaren's papaya rules of 2024 and 2025
The phrase was first heard on McLaren's radio at Monza in September 2024, and it named something the team had been doing for months: letting Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri race each other under a short code. Race cleanly. Leave room. Do not hit the other orange car. Anything within that was permitted.
It was an attempt to have the benefits of a free fight without the collision, and at Monza it showed its cost at once. Piastri passed Norris for the lead at the second chicane on the opening lap, entirely within the code, and the squabble let Charles Leclerc's Ferrari into the mix. Leclerc won. Norris, who was the only driver within reach of Verstappen in the championship, finished third behind his own team-mate. Within a fortnight McLaren said it would lean towards Norris where a choice had to be made.
The code had already needed an old-fashioned order to rescue it. At the Hungaroring on 21 July 2024 Piastri led from the first corner, and at the final stops the team brought Norris in first to cover a threat from behind. The fresh tyres put Norris ahead. McLaren asked him to give the place back, and spent the best part of twenty laps persuading him, his engineer telling him at one point that a championship is not won alone. On lap 68 of 70 Norris slowed on the main straight. It was Piastri's first Grand Prix win.
A year later the roles reversed. At Monza on 7 September 2025, with both drivers now fighting each other for the title, the team pitted Piastri first from third on the understanding that he would not gain a place by it. Norris's own stop a lap later was slow, a problem at the front-left wheel costing several seconds, and he came out behind. Piastri was asked to move over and did so at the start of lap 49 of 53, observing on the radio that he had thought a slow stop was part of racing.
Both swaps restored the order that had existed before the team's own pit sequence disturbed it, and that is the principle McLaren defended. It is a coherent one. It is also a team order, issued by a team that had spent two seasons saying it would rather not issue any. More on how Woking has handled its driver pairings down the decades is in our history of McLaren.
Where a team order ends and race fixing begins
Singapore, 28 September 2008, the first Grand Prix run at night. Fernando Alonso started fifteenth for Renault and made an unusually early pit stop on lap 12. Two laps later his team-mate, Nelson Piquet Jr, spun into the wall at Turn 17, a part of the circuit with no crane nearby, which made a safety car certain. The field bunched, the leaders had yet to stop, and Alonso won.
It was treated as luck for almost a year. Then Piquet, dropped by the team in the middle of 2009, told the FIA that the crash had been deliberate and that he had been asked to do it.
The World Motor Sport Council met on 21 September 2009. Renault did not contest the charge. The team was disqualified from the championship, with the penalty suspended for two years. Flavio Briatore, the team principal, was banned indefinitely from FIA-sanctioned events, and Pat Symonds, the engineering director, for five years. Piquet had been granted immunity in exchange for his evidence, and Alonso was found to have known nothing. A French court overturned the two personal bans in January 2010 on procedural grounds, and a settlement followed under which neither man would work in Formula 1 until 2013. The race result was never altered, a point that later became the subject of a claim brought by Massa in the High Court in London.
| Case | What the team did | Who was affected | Sanction |
|---|---|---|---|
| Austria 2002 | Swapped its own two cars on the line | Its own drivers | $1 million fine, for the podium ceremony |
| Germany 2010 | Swapped its own two cars with a coded message during the ban | Its own drivers | $100,000 fine |
| Malaysia 2013 | Told its own cars to hold position | Its own drivers | None; legal |
| Singapore 2008 | Ordered a deliberate crash to bring out the safety car | Every other competitor, marshals, spectators | Suspended disqualification; personal bans |
The table shows where the line runs. An ordinary team order redistributes a result between two cars belonging to the same entrant, and every other competitor finishes where they would have finished anyway. Singapore put a car into a wall on purpose, in front of marshals, and used the officials' safety procedures as a weapon against the rest of the field. One is a decision about the team's own property. The other is fraud with a risk to life attached.
Collusion between separate teams falls on the wrong side of the same line, and it is harder to prove. After the 1997 title decider at Jerez, where Jacques Villeneuve let both McLarens past him on the final lap, the FIA examined whether Williams and McLaren had made an arrangement and found no case to answer. The question has returned in the era of jointly owned teams. When a driver from Red Bull's sister outfit took the fastest lap in Singapore in 2024, removing a bonus point from Norris, rivals asked aloud whose interests had been served. No action was taken, and the fastest lap point was dropped from the regulations for 2025.
Whether team orders decide championships
Less often than the noise around them suggests. The clearest evidence comes from two seasons that sit three years apart and point in opposite directions.
In 2010 Ferrari gave the order. The swap at Hockenheim moved seven points from Massa to Alonso. At the final round in Abu Dhabi, Alonso lost the title to Vettel by four. So the most notorious team order of its decade was not enough, and Red Bull, which had conspicuously declined to choose between Vettel and Webber even at the penultimate race, won anyway.
In 2007 McLaren refused to give one. Hamilton and Alonso were kept on equal terms through a season of open hostility, each taking points from the other. Ferrari, meanwhile, moved Massa out of Räikkönen's way through the pit stops at the last race. The outcome is the strongest argument a team principal has for picking a favourite.
- 110Kimi Räikkönen
- 109Lewis Hamilton
- 109Fernando Alonso
Final drivers' championship totals. McLaren's two drivers finished level and one behind the Ferrari driver whose team-mate had made way for him at the last round.
Other seasons fall between those poles. In 1999 Mika Salo, standing in at Ferrari, gave up a win at Hockenheim to Eddie Irvine, who then lost the title to Häkkinen by two points. In 2008 Massa was handed second place by Räikkönen in China, two points more than third paid under the scale then in use, and still finished a single point short of Hamilton.
And once, on the arithmetic, an order has covered the whole margin. Norris won the 2025 championship by two points from Verstappen, 423 to 421. The swap at Monza that September was worth three to him. Remove it, change nothing else, and he finishes one point behind. That is a counterfactual and should be treated as one, since a season with a different Monza is a season in which other decisions change too. It is still the closest the sport has come to a title that turned on a single instruction from the pit wall.
The fair conclusion is narrow. Orders rarely settle a championship, declining to give them has cost one outright, and no team principal can know in July which kind of season he is in. That uncertainty explains why the radio message keeps being sent, seventy years after Moss looked across at Fangio and wondered.
For more on who makes these calls on a race afternoon, see our guide to the roles inside an F1 team. The motorsport section carries our technical explainers, and the England hub lists every guide in this series.