Does F1 still need number two drivers?

The 2002 Austrian Grand Prix changed everything. When Rubens Barrichello eased off exiting the last corner having - pitstops aside - led from start to finish, to gift victory to his Ferrari team-mate Michael Schumacher, team orders would never be the same again.

This egregious bait and switch, in which the watching world believed it was witnessing a great victory for the Brazilian, only for Schumacher to be handed his fifth win in six races, prompted global fury.

Schumacher and everyone in the team were shocked by the outcry that ensued. It ultimately led to the FIA instigating an unworkable ban on team orders that was binned at the end of 2010 in the wake of the first occasion on which it was seriously tested. After all, team orders were as old as the hills as far as grand prix racing was concerned. But so cack-handed was the timing of the swap, courtesy of Barrichello's desire to give away victory at the last possible moment, that the concept of the number-two driver was besmirched for good.

Look back half-a-century or so and attitudes were very different. As Froilan Gonzalez headed to Ferrari's first victory in a world championship grand prix at Silverstone in 1951, the Scuderia's lead driver Alberto Ascari retired with a gearbox problem and was offered the chance to take over the Argentinian's car. He declined, but it wouldn't have been unusual for him to have jumped in to score some points.

A year earlier there were suspicions that Alfa Romeo, which had been tempted to return to grand prix racing by the inauguration of the world championship, favoured Giuseppe Farina over Juan Manuel Fangio come the Monza title decider. After all, an Italian driver winning the first title in an Italian car was a seductive prospect commercially and veteran Farina did start the year with senior-driver status.

Then there was Peter Collins having to hand over his Ferrari to his team-mate Fangio at the 1956 title-deciding Italian Grand Prix while the Briton still had a chance of the title - a decision that in the final reckoning was perfectly rational as it allowed the Argentinian to beat Maserati number one Stirling Moss to the crown, which Collins was almost certainly unable to do.

There are plenty of other examples of this kind of thing stretching back even to the pre-war years and in the six decades that separate Farina's title to the current day. But over the past 10 or so years, teams opting for a clear number-one/number-two policy have carried a stigma.

Collins gave his car to Fangio on several occasions, like at Monaco in '56 © LAT

Arguably, the nadir came at Hockenheim in 2010 when Ferrari ordered Felipe Massa to let Fernando Alonso past to further the Spaniard's title hopes, which in the context of what happened in the rest of the season was a perfectly reasonable decision. What grated far more than the fact that Massa had to relinquish his first comeback victory a year to the day since he came close to losing his life in Hungary, however, was the way that the regulations forced Ferrari's drivers to deny what had happened. That insulted the intelligence of fans and was hugely damaging to the sport - far more so than the switch itself.

Even last year there were plenty of conspiracy theories about Red Bull supposedly favouring Sebastian Vettel over Mark Webber, although it's impossible to create a reasonable argument that the Australian was anything approaching his team-mate's equal last year. Of course, this was partly a hangover from what happened in 2010, a year during which Webber had every chance of winning the title and probably would have done had he not crashed out in Korea.

So where does that leave the thorny issue of team orders in 2012? The bottom line is that they are frowned upon but now completely legal. So how about the question of whether they are really necessary?

Very often, it's a moot point. Plenty of teams will bestow equal status and equipment on drivers and a de facto number one will emerge based on performance. This is particularly the case among the championship-challenging teams given the relative sparsity of title-calibre drivers. At Ferrari, Alonso is clearly the driver who will deliver a title, not Massa, while at Red Bull Vettel emerged as the go-to guy last year. Either of McLaren's drivers is capable of mounting a title push, making the Woking team perhaps the only outfit with genuine, workable, equal number ones.

Williams allowed Piquet (6) and Mansell to fight for '86 crown. It didn't work © LAT

It can be a risky strategy, as most famously Williams discovered in 1986 when Nigel Mansell and Nelson Piquet fought for the title in the best car and took enough points off each other to allow McLaren's Alain Prost to steal the crown. But if you think back to examples over the past quarter of a century, it's relatively rare that a natural order of lead driver and subordinate hasn't established itself in a top team. Look at McLaren in 2008-2009, where Heikki Kovalainen ended up very much as the team's second driver, despite equal status. While there were occasions when McLaren didn't have multiple versions of its upgrade packages, in 2009 when it was hastily turning its car from truck to winner in particular, it was always perfectly logical to give the parts to Lewis Hamilton.

But what about the cases when there has been a genuine number one/number two policy from the off? The examples that stand out are Ferrari and Renault in recent years. Ferrari is the most extreme example, during the Schumacher years in particular, but it's difficult to argue too strenuously with the policy given that he was undoubtedly the leading driver for those years. Eddie Irvine would certainly agree and although Barrichello had his days, he wasn't Schumacher's equal either.

Perhaps a more interesting example was Flavio Briatore's Renault in 2004. Alonso was the team's ordained number one and on balance he was certainly the stronger all-round driver. But Jarno Trulli, in the right circumstances, has always proved capable of devastating speed and the 2004 Renault just happened to be right in his tight performance window. He won at Monaco and after seven races had 36 points to Alonso's 25. Soon, he fell out with Briatore and was out of the team before the end of the season, the consequence of his performances being too good.

"I don't want to say too much about that situation because I want to keep away from politics," says Trulli of his experience. "I'm not the kind of person who wants to slam people that are not here anymore and I'm not the kind of person that feels harshly treated.

Trulli beat Renault number one Alonso in early '04, and then got sacked © LAT

"All I can say is that I wasn't lucky enough at that stage, or maybe I should have done things in a different way. I am a very straightforward, serious person and I always talk straight to the people in high-up positions. It didn't work for me there so I wasn't given the chance to stay."

On balance, can you blame Briatore? While Trulli has always been a driver capable of achieving greatness when all was perfect, Alonso is a great driver, period. Had Trulli stayed on in 2005 and liked the Renault, which given his narrow performance window is not a foregone conclusion, perhaps the points they had taken off each other would have handed Kimi Raikkonen the title? While the focus is so often on individual drivers rather than teams in terms of the wider perception of the sport, if you're a team boss your job is to deliver titles. Trulli can rightly feel hard done by for what happened, but there is logic to Renault's move.

You might argue that if you take that view, then what happened in Singapore in 2008, when Nelson Piquet Jr crashed deliberately to aid Alonso, is acceptable. But that is taking the argument to an absurd extreme and no one would contend that what happened there was anything other than outrageous.

In road cycling, nobody questions the concept of team orders. If you are a domestique, you know your place and cruel as what happened in Austria 2002 was for Barrichello, he understood what he was getting into when he signed on the dotted line. The way that the switch was executed did insult the fans, who likely would have accepted what happened had it been done in a more orthodox way earlier in the race. Once again, honesty is the key to that rather than the offensiveness of the act in itself.

So there is a clear argument for the implementation of team orders, despite how savagely people react to it. Take last year's British Grand Prix, where Webber was ordered to hold position behind Vettel late on. Adrian Newey explained after the race that this was because Vettel's strategy had earlier been compromised to help Webber and it's hardly lunacy to order your two drivers not to fight in the dying laps of a race. And even if Vettel is Red Bull's favourite, you can hardly blame the team given the fact that he is already acknowledged by many as an all-time great.

Heading into 2012, the hierarchies in two of the top teams are clear. Alonso is Ferrari's man and while we can't discount a Webber revival, it seems that Vettel is, on merit, now established as Red Bull's number one. The benefit of such clear-cut delineation is clear when we look at McLaren, where there is the greatest potential for fireworks should Jenson Button and Hamilton be in the thick of the title fight. Exciting as that will be for the watching world, you can see why it has the potential to give Martin Whitmarsh a few headaches.

Ultimately, teams will always back their better driver. Ken Tyrrell put it best when he said "my first driver is the fastest driver".