Yesterday I drove home from Silverstone, stopping off to have lunch with my father in London, which was a nice thing to do. If there was a twinge of guilt about not writing anything on the blog I must have missed it, I felt like a day off and having worked much of Sunday night and Monday morning I felt I deserved it as well. The British GP is an enjoyable event because one sees some many old friends, but the problem with that is that one spends too long chatting and not enough time working… I felt Ferrari thoroughly deserved the win at Silverstone – and good for them. I think that most important point about what happened at Red Bull went sailing way over the heads of the pressmen who were so busy trying to discover whether there were team orders and who had what to say about that.

Team orders are allowed if they do not bring the sport into disrepute. But that is not the point. The key point is that the relationship between Mark Webber and the team is such that they are talking openly about it all. Mark is saying: “I wanted to win the race and ignored what they told me”. He is out of contract at the end of the year and when a driver is going to stay with a team he has something to lose by speaking out. Mark obviously does not care, just as the team obviously does not care that telling him to back off will be upsetting. This all translates to mean that the Mark Webber-Red Bull relationship looks like it is coming to an end an the fact that Red Bull has shoved Daniel Ricciardo into HRT to get urgent racing experience in F1 can only mean one thing: Webber will not be staying at Red Bull Racing. His open confession that he had team orders and was ignoring them will not go down well, particularly with the uncompromising Dr Helmut Marko, who has long appeared to be pro-Vettel, notably last year in Turkey where he supported Vettel after an incident that was clearly the fault of the German. Later at Silverstone Vettel was given Webber’s front wing in qualifying after he damaged his own. Vettel duly took pole position but messed up in the race and so the Australian swept to victory, famously remarking that his achievement was “not bad for a number two driver”.

This year Vettel has been the dominant of the two drivers but the question of a team favouring one driver over another has led some to wonder if the two are getting the same machinery, or whether Webber is once again playing with the deck stacked against him.