- 29 Jul 14, 14:03#411209All responsibilities go out the window when your "employer" gives you a car that catches fire and a car that makes you crash into a barrier when the brake rotor explodes. If we continue with the employer/employee analogy, you'd think a driver would have grounds for a law suit because of an unsafe led to a crash. This is a WDC championship that is being contested, that the request was asking Lewis to potentially hand over an additional 13 points to a driver he's been behind on points primarily because the Mercedes he's driving keeps blowing up is a bit surreal.
If Nico wanted to win, he should have driven like he wanted to win, (more like Ricciardo) instead of driving like he was entitled to win. The WCC best results is a bunk pseudo explanation because they're currently leading the championship by 180 or so points, and losing three points to Red Bull yesterday is not bad, considering what they asked Hamilton to do to get his 15 points.
In this sport it not just about being fast, or being faster than the other guy, it's about doing it when it counts. And it doesn't matter how fast you are if you can't overtake the guy in front of you because of a tight circuit all the speed goes out the window. It happens in Monaco all the time. I think yesterday the faster driver did show on the track, everyone on the podium earned the spot.
What's more fundamental is that Lewis and Nico are most certainly NOT employees of Mercedes, they are independent contractors. This might not seem like much, but in a legal sense it affects the rights and responsibilities of both the company and the individual massively. Their individual contracts will have been individually negotiated at length and will be markedly different from one another. I'm pretty sure that certainly Lewis and possibly Nico will each have a clause stating that where a team 'order' is given, this is advisory and open to challenge by the driver as they evaluate the 'order' in the context of what is going on around them on the circuit as they see it. There's no way Lewis would have taken the gamble (because at the time it was of course a gamble) to move to Mercedes without his contract being heavily loaded in his favour in an unrestricted racing sense.
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