Zetec wrote:Red Bull has obviously decided that Webber will not get a contract for 2014. That's what newspaper in Switzerland and Germany are claiming.
In a way it's sad. Vettel does shite, and Webber has to pay for it. On the other hand I'm happy, that Webber is finally out of that team. No one deserves that treatment.
And as I thought before: Red Bull has never reprimanded Vettel after the race, it is just what they say to the media.
It may not necessarily be just because Red Bull want to dismiss Webber - Briatore said that he could not envisage Red Bull's current line up lasing beyond the end of this year, and with the combination of Webber's advancing age (he turns 37 this year and is the oldest driver in the field by quite some way), it is possible that Mark has decided to walk out of the team and into retirement on his own initiative.
I do think, though, that one of Briatore's comments on Red Bull does hit home hard - that it is a team that is being run by the drivers, not the team manager, given that both drivers have now publicly flouted team orders.
LellaLombardi wrote:Very good point - when Webber disobeyed team orders at Silverstone he was seen as edgy, gritty, sticking it to the man, especially by the BBC. Vettel get accused of behaving like a spoilt brat - is it because he's younger? Seems like double standards to me. It's never good when driver's dads start getting involved as Webber Snr has just done on the BBC. They're hardly going to have an unexpected opinion and come on, these drivers are grown men, why do they need their Dads butting in?
In that instance, I think that perhaps there was an element of prejudice against Vettel and the team management given what had happened in 2010 - such as the switching of front wings in the 2010 British GP - which probably meant that quite a few people saw Webber's defiance of the team orders as striking back against a perceived bias of the team towards Vettel. It may be that slight "underdog" aspect that meant that quite a few people were willing to back Webber up and, in the case of the BBC, I imagine that, try as he might, given Coulthard has been both a team mate and friend of Webber for a number of years and may inevitably be influenced, directly or indirectly, by that.
Flip that situation around, therefore, and I suppose that there would be those that might feel that Vettel's decision to disregard the team orders, plus the expectation that Red Bull would not take any severe action against him, feeds, rightly or wrongly, into that image of Vettel as the "protected one" within the team.
Equally, I think that there may be an element of mistrust about Vettel within some sections of the press over his public persona - I know that the photographer Darren Heath, for example, has claimed on more than one occasion that he feels that Vettel's "happy go lucky" persona is a calculated image that he puts on for the press to sweeten his image and that Vettel's true persona is harsher, more ruthless and calculating than he portrays himself in the public eye. I think that there may be a few within the press who wonder whether Vettel's public persona is entirely honest or not, and that slight uncertainty about his character probably does create a slightly negative association about him, such that any unsavoury activities are likely to rankle ever more sharply against his public image.
Webber, for both good and bad, seems to be perceived by the press to be a fairly honest person and the sort of person who wouldn't bother to sweeten the pill, even if he knows that it may hurt those around him to. I imagine that there might be those within the press that admire, to use the old phrase, the "publish and be damned" attitude of Webber, and the fact that he has had to battle his way into F1 (having had to beg for money at one point to continue his career). Vettel, who has had the full support (both in terms of contacts and sheer spending power) of Red Bull's Young Driver Program from almost the beginning of his career, perhaps has an image of entitlement around him that contrasts all the more sharply with the image of the hard grafting Australian, which probably exacerbates the negative image that he is given in the press at times.
DanielPT wrote:JJMonty wrote:
Webber didn't bulk under pressure. He had broken his leg (yet again in a cycling accident) before Korea - but kept it a secret from Red Bull until after the season.
Eitherway, he cost himself the championship with that crash in Korea - but having seen how average his driving was for the last few races of the year, that suggests to me that he was in a lot of discomfort for those final races.
Actually it was a fractured shoulder. I don't deny that he might have driven in pain and not 100%, nevertheless he still finished 2nd both in Japan and Brazil (injury was before Japan) and managed to be 2nd and 3rd on the grid in both those races and in Korea. But I still believe Mark when he says that it didn't had any impact on the championship race.
As an aside, I have to wonder what was going through Webber's mind in the Korean GP, since he did seem somewhat agitated throughout that race. There were the despondent messages he gave to the team and race control, plus the rather animated discussion he had with Mylander during the red flag period (he spent quite a bit of time talking with him about the conditions and was quite strongly against continuing to race). It seemed as if, somehow, his heart really wasn't in that race long before he crashed out, almost as if crashing out was something of a relief to him given that he was going backwards through the field at the time.
