Of course, in the week since Ferrari pulled a swapsy between their drivers which ensured the most advantageous result from a championship perspective, there has been much debate about the rights and wrongs of what happened, including on the F1 Rejects forum. My views have been made quite clear on the various threads on the forum and I won’t repeat them here. But it seems appropriate, now that the dust has settled somewhat, to draw together some of the key issues which emerged from the saga.

The first theme is that it was not really in dispute that Ferrari did the logical thing. There is no point asking what if another Silverstone 1999 occurs. The odds of that happening are far outweighed by the odds that Alonso will continue being faster than Massa, who up till Hockenheim has been lacklustre, for the rest of the year. Massa has likewise benefited in the past when he was the main title contender, plus Alonso was indeed faster in Germany and it was not his fault that Vettel squeezed him at the start.

The second theme that emerged was the strength of sympathy for Massa, and the virulence of the reaction against Alonso and Ferrari. It was reflective of how much Ferrari are still hated for Austria 2002, and how much Alonso himself is disliked for his petulance when he doesn’t get his way. It is also symptomatic of how well-loved Massa has become in the last two years, since his 2008 championship heartbreak and what happened in Hungary last year. Perceptions make people do funny things.

The third theme, to my mind, was that Ferrari was unable to salvage the situation and how the media played a role in that. Massa’s engineer Rob Smedley, and to some extent Felipe himself, wore their hearts on their sleeve which is understandable, and it added fuel to the fire. The media, however, fanned the flames. Everyone knew what happened, but the kangaroo-court cross-examination post-race, as if trying to childishly force a confession out of Ferrari, painted the team into a corner.

That also turned focus onto the fourth theme - the sham which is the ‘no team orders’ rule, which forces everyone to make a charade out of team strategy. The fact that the stewards, perhaps bowing to pressure, decided to prosecute Ferrari and refer them to the WMSC seemed arbitrary. As I have argued on the forum, why focus on this example of team tactics? Why not investigate ‘hold position’ orders or other midrace strategic positional swaps? Why is maximising race results OK but not championship outcomes?

The point is, team orders, team strategy, team tactics, call them what you will, has been a part of motorsport forever. Not only is a ‘no team orders’ rule unenforceable, but it has the whiff of being open to convenient interpretation, to be used at times when the way a team wants a result clashes with how officialdom or the public want a result. It allows biases to be revealed. Given what also happened at Valencia and Silverstone, is officialdom now anti-Ferrari as a reaction to being labelled as excessively pro-Ferrari?

Which brings us to the fifth and perhaps most fundamental theme that this incident raised - and that is how subjective motorsport can be, and at its core, what do we want motorsport and our champions to be? Is F1 a team sport or an individual sport? It makes for an interesting comparison with the Tour de France, which glorifies individual success but which essentially is a team event where teams work for the benefit of one man. In F1 the roles and relative importance of a team and an individual are not as clear.

But yet this is a critical question for determining what kind of on-track action we would like to see. We might like to see genuine individual wheel-to-wheel combat, in line with a romantic notion of F1 as a sport for human gladiators. But the teams, their sponsors, and perhaps even the drivers don’t perceive it that way; they see it as the business of gaining success in terms of points and dollars, for the team as a whole. Which of these stakeholders, the fans on one hand, the participants on the other, takes precedence?

If you say the fans’ desire for real sport takes priority, how do you make it happen? One car teams? A control chassis formula which goes against the technical ingenuity F1 also stands for? Or US-style means of increasing entertainment and combat? But then, bear in mind how we often deride American racing for artificially bunching up the field, for ice-age machinery, for allowing drivers to bump others out of the way and yet making insane decisions like punishing Helio Castroneves for blocking at Edmonton last week?

But if you accept that the participants’ priorities should be at the forefront, then really F1 is not about the romance of competition but the rather more Machiavellian sweet smell of success, and we need to face that reality and adjust our expectations accordingly. But in turn is that a sad commentary on the effect of the professionalisation and commercialisation of sport? No wonder here at F1 Rejects we like to celebrate mere participation. And with that, it is time to move on to talk about the race itself.

Perhaps everyone has been a little too fast to write Ferrari and Alonso off and declare it as a four-way (and two-team) battle for the titles. The red cars were certainly the most lethal weapons at Hockenheim, on top of the promising but thwarted outings at Valencia and Silverstone. How Maranello must be ruing their slump of sorts after the opening flourish in Bahrain, when a combination of driving mistakes, strategic screw-ups, and a less-effective development program has left them chasing the championship.

F1 history is full of stories of teams that came good in the midseason and maintained that form in the latter half of the year, but found the deficit that they had already conceded too great to overcome. For example there was Williams in 1991, Ferrari in 1997-98, and even Red Bull last year. Ferrari will need to maintain the surge if Alonso is to have a real chance, and Massa’s return to some kind of decent form could prove crucial since the McLaren and Red Bull drivers are fighting each other.

Red Bull, however, not only have two drivers competing against each other, but they also have to deal with their repeated inability to capitalise, almost as if they don’t know how. Vettel’s pole lap was as close to a perfect lap of Hockenheim as possible, and though his start was not great, his naïve but futile aggression in trying to push Alonso into the pit wall meant he simply ended up dropping behind both Ferraris, and he could not seriously challenge them for the rest of the race.

If he had fluffed his start, why not concede that he might not be able to fend off Alonso and instead concentrate on getting the best line into turn one and keeping the rest of the pack behind? It was the extra distance that he travelled swerving across the track which not only opened the door for Massa but allowed the Brazilian to sweep past. Had he stayed on his line, I dare say that he would have been able to hold off Felipe and he would have been 2nd instead of 3rd. Discretion is the better part of naked aggression.

But no wonder Vettel isn’t nurtured by his team to drive with his head as well as his adrenaline when you consider what Red Bull did with Mark Webber’s strategy. In truth the Australian struggled with understeer all weekend. I lost count of the number of apexes he missed during qualifying and the race from his on-board camera. And that in itself was concerning. Although he has the most wins of the (now) five title challengers, we all suspect that, on sheer ability alone, Mark might be the weakest of the contenders.

He has got to where he is by driving on emotion, and at the same time finding the perfect sweet spot of the RB6. But what if some of the anger and desire to prove himself subsides? What if he starts getting out of the groove? Can he recapture it? After the Valencia disaster the front-wing saga at Silverstone brought him into the zone again, and he duly won. But here, he screwed up his Q3 flying lap despite going after Vettel, and he was not a factor in the race. Has his season already peaked?

Once Webber had lost 4th place to Lewis Hamilton on the first lap, the call to bring him in for his tyre change when that occurred made zero sense. If Hamilton pitted at the same time, Mark was unlikely to pass the McLaren with a much faster stop. Any attempt at leapfrogging the McLaren was improbable since he would be fed back amongst Robert Kubica and the Mercedes cars. His best chance was actually to wait for Hamilton to pit, and put in some mega laps in clear air.

Alternatively, if Red Bull was not confident of being able to pass Hamilton, then the emphasis should have been on defending against Jenson Button, but the daft timing of Mark’s stop meant that eventually he lost 5th as well. Now Vettel is back level on points (although Webber is ahead on countback), but worryingly it also looks as though Sebastian is starting to assert his few-tenths natural advantage over the Australian. If the German pulls well ahead in Hungary, there might be no looking back.

The McLarens ran steadily to score more points to consolidate their position in the points standings, but they will be concerned that after virtually drawing level with the Red Bulls in Turkey, Canada and Valencia, they have slipped back in Britain and Germany. This is mainly due to their inability to master the blown diffuser concept, and perhaps also the allegedly flexing front wings which Red Bull and Ferrari are both employing. McLaren need to fight back and not merely rely on their rivals slipping up.

Button’s strategy of staying out longer on the super-softs and trusting that that was better than going onto fresh hard tyres (the larger-than-usual gap between the Bridgestones having proven to be a completely damp squib when neither tyre showed massive degradation - unlike Canada where both compounds did degrade) was vindicated by the other two teams that made it five teams with both cars in the points: Renault and Mercedes.

Kubica basically spent the entire race in a net 7th place ahead of the two silver cars, as once again he maximised the capabilities of the R30. Vitaly Petrov, though, having started 13th, gained a place on the first lap and then pitted later than his two direct rivals, Rubens Barrichello and Kamui Kobayashi, passing both in the process. The Russian remains under pressure to keep his seat for next year with better-credentialed drivers available, so finishing within range of Kubica was an important outcome.

Nico Rosberg also managed to jump team-mate Michael Schumacher by staying out longer on the super-softs, but overall this was another very average outing for the Mercedes works team, especially given that it was their first home race since their return. Schumi talked about making the top five in qualifying and practice times suggested that that was not a hopeless cause, but once again the W01s did not fully deliver when it mattered. It seems like they reach their maximum potential too early in the weekend.

Michael of course didn’t even make Q3, and his race rather epitomised the overall trend of his season so far. He started brightly, jumping up to 8th off the start, but the strategic choice of pitting early for the hards did not pay off, and ultimately he could not sustain his challenge. He is now a mammoth, some would say embarrassing, 47 points behind Massa, who is locked in battle with Rosberg and Kubica for 6th in the championship, assuming that the top five now have the drivers’ title fight to themselves.

Given that he had qualified outside of the top 10, it was a surprise not to see Schumacher try the reverse strategy of running the hards first and trying to gain a buffer in clearer air before a late surge on the super-softs. Having said that, the one man who did adopt that strategy, Pedro de la Rosa in the Sauber, reported that the early laps were like “driving on ice” and the tyres did not really come into their own for 20 to 25 laps, so perhaps that tactic would not have paid dividends.

As it was, de la Rosa gained virtually nothing from that strategy. He started 14th and finished there, and would only have been 13th or 12th at best but for his collision with Heikki Kovalainen’s Lotus. Once again the star for Sauber, celebrating 40 respectable years in motorsport, was Kobayashi who was competitive in qualifying, ran 10th early, but then got jumped by Petrov. Still, there were glimpses his feisty best as at various times he took on Rosberg, Webber and Schumacher, and that is why we love him.

The last team which completed the near-Noah’s Ark formation of seven teams in the top 14 finishing positions was Williams, which on sheer pace continue to show that their improvement is no fluke as both Barrichello and Nico Hulkenberg made Q3. But, disappointingly, the Brazilian plummeted from 8th to 12th on the first lap, and Hulkenberg dropped from 10th to 13th, and that’s where they both basically stayed, despite Nico running the first 34 laps on the super-softs!

Toro Rosso could not continue the sequence, thanks to Jaime Alguersuari taking out team-mate Sebastien Buemi on the first lap, and there is really very little more to say about it apart from the fact that it was inexperience on the young Spaniard’s part, misjudging the concertina effect as the cars approached the hairpin on the first lap. Going by Britain and Germany, however, as others are moving forward it looks like STR can’t keep up and are sliding to the back of the established teams once more.

Force India brought both their cars home in 16th and 17th, but this is a race they will want to forget in a hurry. After Adrian Sutil topped the wet first practice, it went downhill from there, with Vitantonio Liuzzi’s crash in Q1, Sutil’s gearbox change, both cars touching on the first lap, the tyre confusion in the pits which forced both cars to pit an extra time to swap tyres, and Sutil having another mid-race off. That’s the kind of sequence of calamities that can only be rewarded with the 'Reject of the Race' award.

Behind them, the new teams languished as Bernie Ecclestone suggested that only Lotus had added anything meaningful to the grid this year. But whilst certainly they are regularly at the top of the new outfits, they cannot challenge the established teams and are no certainties to finish each race. Jarno Trulli’s early gearbox failure means that he has failed to finish more often than he has seen the chequered flag, and Kovalainen’s collision with de la Rosa was a poor mistake which at least the Finn acknowledged.

As Lotus stop development on the T127, there is an opportunity for Virgin. Timo Glock looked like having a serious shot at beating the Lotuses in qualifying, but both he and Lucas di Grassi had gearbox issues which relegated them to the back of the grid. It was the Brazilian’s turn to take up the fight in the race, leaping up to 16th early in the race, putting pressure on the soft-shod Kovalainen whilst he had the hards on his Virgin, but his strategy came to naught when he spun off and damaged his VR01.

It was not a bad tactic by the Virgin team to run the hard tyres first. Glock used the same strategy to overcome Bruno Senna whose HRT had run in front of the German early on. The Brazilian reclaimed his seat whilst Sakon Yamamoto’s yen ensured that he also kept a drive at Karun Chandhok’s expense, the popular Indian now clearly with an uphill battle to get back into the car. With the Indian GP arriving next year, it would be good for him to find a seat and on what he had shown so far, he deserves one.

On reflection, I might have been uncharitable towards Yamamoto for his efforts at Silverstone, given that it was his first race in a while. Having not driven the HRT that much, he actually got decently close to Chandhok and set a faster lap in the race. But at Hockenheim he really was unimpressive. Almost 1.3s off Senna in qualifying, engaging the pit lane speed limiter off the line, and languishing before he retired with gearbox failure had ‘pay driver’ written all over it.