Controversial IRL finale in Fontana

by Graham Email

...with Danica allegedly hitting Jacques Lazier upsides the head after he collided with her, putting them both out of the race (another chassis to be added to the Target Ganassi Racing 2005 Scrap Pile).
However, the most interesting debate is over the way that Tony Kanaan slowed near the finish line, resulting in a win for Dario Franchitti. Despite Kanaan's denials, the hot rumour after the race was that he had been ordered to let Dario win.
I have not seen the race video, so I have no way of knowing what actually happened. However, as a general principle, if Kanaan indeed did ostentatiously "lift" close to the line, he was almost certainly sending the signal that he was "gifting" the race to a rival under orders from the team. Remember, this is what Rubens Barrichello did in Austria in 2003, which ignited a firestorm in Formula 1 at the time. Rubens cleverly obeyed team orders, but also managed to signal that he was doing so under duress. Given that he was clearly quicker than Michael Schumacher on the track at the time, the move justifiably left a lot of racing fans angry, since nobody likes to believe that they are watching a game of charades. Racing fans generally labour under the delusion that they are watching a real race, where every driver is going all-out to win.
The bottom line is that no driver wants to give a rival even a nanosecond on the track, so any team that orders a driver to make way for a rival is putting that driver in the situation where he/she may feel obliged to signal that "I didn't do this because I'm an uncompetitive wuss, I did it because of team orders".