F1 should stop pretending team orders don't exist and mandate they're broadcast live
Team orders in Formula 1 aren't banned anymore, they've been legal since 2011, and every team uses them when a championship is on the line. What's actually broken isn't the existence of team orders, it's the pretense around them. Teams still communicate them in coded language specifically designed to be unclear to viewers and sometimes even to the driver being asked to move over, "the other car is faster than you" being the classic euphemism everyone in the sport recognizes instantly and casual viewers completely miss. If team orders are legal, and they clearly are, the FIA should just require the actual instruction to be part of the broadcast feed in real time, not buried in a radio transcript released after the session. Fans deserve to know in the moment whether they're watching a genuine fight for position or a scripted swap, the same way we get told immediately when a strategy call happens. The coded language doesn't protect the sport's competitive integrity, it just protects teams from the bad press of admitting out loud that they told a driver to let a teammate past.