Why team-mates don't really exist

Every situation is different, but the concept of team-mates where one will run as a wingman while the other wins is largely an illusion.

When you're growing up, you see the term 'team-mate' and assume they are genuinely working as a team. It's not until you start to become involved in racing that you realise a team-mate is often your biggest rival. A lot of the collaboration is forced, though it means different things in different teams.

When Jim Clark was asked in 1967 what it was like being Graham Hill's team-mate at Lotus, he said, 'No, Graham is my team-mate.' We know that Nelson Piquet would not have Ayrton Senna in the Brabham team. The idea that a team-mate really means he's your enemy is one that's been alive and well for a long time. Denny Hulme didn't always confide everything to Jody Scheckter about which gears he should be running at different circuits. It's nothing new.

And relationships can change. After Bruce McLaren slipped his Cooper down the inside of Jack Brabham's in, I think, the 1961 Lady Wigram Trophy in New Zealand, Bruce felt the relationship altered with that move. There is always that element of "I want to do better than the other guy", which leads to those defining moments.

Gilles Villeneuve was a well-behaved team-mate with Scheckter in 1979, but when Didier Pironi got on the wrong side of Villeneuve there was war. It's a very fragile thing. And it's not just Formula 1. In sportscars there are cases where your team-mate brings in the car and says "Everything is fine", then you get to the end of the pitlane and the brake pedal has the same amount of feeling as the clutch pedal, and nobody mentioned it...

Drivers are usually customers, which means both bring independent budgets - and are driving for themselves © LAT

There's an inherent rivalry, and the selfish streak can take over at any point. Arturo Merzario, driving for Ferrari in the 1973 Nurburgring 1000km, overtook lead driver Jacky Ickx and, after repeated instructions, finally fell back behind him, then hit Ickx's car and, after ignoring 'pit' orders, eventually came in and had to be forced out of the driving seat while clenching the steering wheel to hand over to Carlos Pace!

In 1970, during a single-driver 500km race at Imola, Porsche 917 team-mates Pedro Rodriguez and Brian Redman were competing. Rodriguez retired after a crunch. Later, when Redman made his scheduled fuel stop, Pedro, fully suited and helmeted, walked up to Brian and told him that he (Redman) seemed tired and so Rodriguez would complete the race. Redman replied he wasn't tired at all, felt fine, drove off down the pitlane and went on to win the race.

The 1981 Brazilian Grand Prix result is quite famous for Carlos Reutemann's refusal to concede victory to team-mate Alan Jones, much to Jones's annoyance. Reutemann's logic, however, was that at the previous race (Long Beach) he had dutifully followed Jones into second place when he felt he could easily have passed him. After the race, Carlos felt slighted that Jones hadn't acknowledged or thanked him.

I did some races with Tim Harvey, who is a good driver and charming, but JR Ewing from Dallas is his hero and he would do anything he could to go one up on something. I saw it with some humour and affection, almost! In one race, squirming around on wet tyres and with a misted-up screen, I brought it in and left him on wet tyres even though it was drying. He was back in within a lap. That wasn't malicious; it was just poor judgement! But it didn't help us. Nevertheless we did win the Oulton Park Gold Cup, so how bad could that be?

The new thing appears to be to keep as much information from your team-mate as you possibly can. You always want to have the upper hand. I think Johnny Herbert was not allowed to see Michael Schumacher's telemetry at Benetton. Unfortunately, it seems a lot of people take that attitude.

Not sharing data is one of the most common tricks to hurt your supposed 'team-mate' © LAT

When you get two drivers in a single-seater team or a sportscar team, for instance, both drivers are often responsible for a lot of the budget. So they will think, "I am here for myself, I paid for this".

Because the bosses of a team are in line with that sponsorship, they do not always have the same authority over drivers who have made it possible for the team to run. Both bring money rather than be paid, so that makes the collaboration a marriage of convenience and comes down to the individuals concerned.

You should want a fast team-mate, otherwise you won't develop. That's a good thing if you haven't got the wit to work it out for yourself. These days, because everyone has access to data, they are forced to have their laps looked at by the other guy in the team. That can help people get very, very close. In the pre-data days it was harder to do that. But I don't like a team-mate being your greatest enemy - I genuinely like the idea of drivers working together.

Sometimes you'll have equal drivers, and, as long as the other doesn't behave like a superstar, you hope their intentions are the same as yours. I would often give a team-mate everything, and may the best driver win. If you're a proper racing driver, the car will only be able to go so fast anyway.

I would never want to calculate a way of making their performance worse. I'm sure that happens, but it's harder to hide what gear you're using, what revs you change at, and so on, because all the data is there now.

So do the best job you can. It's not about hiding what you can to get one over on your team-mate, but doing something you know they can't.