Triple world champion Niki Lauda locked horns with the Ferrari team last week over its team orders strategy in last month’s German GP at Hockenheim.
But quite why the two sides are so wound up by another day in the life of F1 seems beyond me.
But I was much amused by the fact that Ferrari offered the view that "good old Niki missed out on a fine opportunity to keep his mouth shut, given that when he was a Scuderia driver, the supposed Ferrari driver management policy suited him perfectly".
As I’ve said before, Ferrari really should do its homework before launching off like this.
The truth of the matter, again as I’ve said before, is that when Niki was Ferrari's top dog the Austrian was discrminated against by the Maranello management to the point that he walked out of the team and joined Bernie Ecclestone’s Brabham squad after winning his second title in 1977.
Ferrari did just about everything it could to make Niki’s life a misery after he withdrew from the ’76 Japanese GP at Mount Fuji, thereby handing James Hunt the championship. So for Ferrari to claim in any way that Niki benefited from preferential treatment during his time at Maranello is just factually not the case at all.
A column on the official Ferrari website accused Niki of "having to indulge on some verbal acrobatics to reposition himself in line with the prevailing wind".
Pardon me, but those were the underlying basics on which Enzo Ferrari built his successful empire.
Complaining about Lauda’s observations isn’t going to alter the fact that Ferrari breached the rules at Hockenheim. Whether the stupid rules should have been on the statute book, of course, is another matter altogether.
