Former Ferrari man Rob Smedley had a reputation for being straightforward on the team radio during his days as a race engineer. The 51-year-old has worked in a different era of F1 than what it is today.
When Smedley was asked about how radio conversations and team order situations have mellowed down today despite being allowed, he expressed his candid opinion. Smedley feels that engineers may be mollycoddling the drivers a bit instead of being blunt on team radio calls.
“In general, I think in Formula 1 now, there’s too much kind of like pussyfooting around,” he said on the Red Flags podcast. “The way the radio messages go to the drivers, I don’t watch every single race, but the races I watch, I’m like: ‘F**king grow a pair, man. Just tell him what you need to tell him'”.
The British former engineer highlighted that drivers can act like “narcissistic socio-paths” who may steal a yard if they are given an inch. So, Smedley feels that engineers need to start being stern with the drivers once again or else they may lose control in their mutual relationship.
The hosts had asked this question in the context of the team orders fiasco that McLaren had at the 2024 Hungarian GP. However, Smedley did not wish to drag the Woking team’s boss and his former colleague Andrea Stella as they already have faced enough criticism for their mess-up in Budapest.
Lando Norris has admitted he hasn’t “felt too proud” at the way he reacted to McLaren’s F1 team orders in the Hungarian GP, labelling his decision to not let Oscar Piastri through immediately as “stupid” ❌
Should Lando have let Oscar through straight away? pic.twitter.com/oDQmYxRMgl
— Autosport (@autosport) July 25, 2024
It was an error in communicating the sequence of pitstops as McLaren brought in Lando Norris for his second stop before the race leader Oscar Piastri, who later lost the lead to the Briton. Hence, the McLaren pit wall had to plead with Norris to swap positions with his teammate who was set to win that race in the first two stints.
While the #4 driver eventually agreed and let Piastri pass, it put a dampener on a rather impressive 1-2 finish by the Woking team. It would have been interesting to see how Smedley would’ve handled this situation.
Smedley’s team orders dilemma from years ago
The former Ferrari engineer used to be in Felipe Massa’s ears during his time at the Scuderia. However, as the Brazilian’s form started to fade relative to his teammate Fernando Alonso, it made things difficult for Smedley as team orders often came into play.
In fact, team orders were banned by the FIA in the 2000s until 2011. So, when Massa and Alonso were in a fix at the 2010 German Grand Prix, with the two-time world champion behind the Brazilian, Ferrari deployed veiled team orders via Smedley.
The British engineer made his infamous radio call: “Fernando is faster than you, can you confirm that you understand that message?” It was a quite obvious disregard of the restrictions on team orders and the Italian outfit had to pay a fine as well.
Years later, Smedley highlighted that he did not agree with the decision to let Alonso overtake Massa. “You know I did not agree with it. I think it was the wrong thing to do, personally,” he said in an interview with Motorsport.com. While he understood that Ferrari wanted to prioritize Alonso’s race as he was the one challenging for the championship, the season had just reached its halfway stage.
Per Smedley, it wasn’t necessary to deploy team orders at that race, as even Massa had been quicker than the Spaniard at certain points of the season. Nevertheless, it was a team radio call that stuck with Smedley for the rest of his career.
