Lotus did not consider employing team orders in order to boost Kimi Raikkonen’s chances of winning the Bahrain grand prix.

The 2007 world champion ultimately finished second and even had a stab at overtaking winner Sebastian Vettel.

And he might have had an ever better chance at challenging the Red Bull had his Lotus team chiefs ordered teammate Romain Grosjean aside at a crucial moment.

“Yeah,” confirmed Finn Raikkonen, “but there are no team orders and we know the rules.

“I tried to get past as quickly as I can but it’s not easy with two similar cars.

“It’s always easy to say afterwards ‘if we had done that’ but in the end we were not fast enough to win and we have to take the second,” he added.

Despite team orders being effectively legal in F1, team boss Eric Boullier confirmed that Lotus does not follow that policy.

“We don’t want to play team orders, so we let them race normally and what happened, happened,” he is quoted by the Mirror.

The most important thing, according to Spanish commentator and former veteran F1 engineer Joan Villadelprat, is that the former Renault team still knows how to win.

“Maybe they don’t have the best car on the grid, because McLaren and Red Bull and Mercedes are probably better, but Lotus have made a car capable of competing with the best in the right circumstances,” he wrote in El Pais newspaper.

Sebastian Vettel needs to accept the reality of a number 2 role for the good of Red Bull’s 2010 title chances.

That is the claim of former triple world champion and outspoken commentator Niki Lauda, following reports the young German is reluctant to give up the chase for his first title in deference to the team’s points leader Mark Webber.

The news also follows boss Christian Horner’s insistence that the team will “support both (drivers) equally” in Brazil and Abu Dhabi “in line with Red Bull’s credible sporting ethos”.

But with Ferrari’s Fernando Alonso leading the championship and fully backed by his teammate Felipe Massa, Lauda said Red Bull’s policy is a road to failure.

“Red Bull needs to establish the team hierarchy now,” the great Austrian is quoted by Bild newspaper.

“If they don’t get behind Mark Webber, they may have to go without the title.”

Lauda’s only concern is that the exercising of team orders within Red Bull is done in a way that does not “cheat the spectators”.

Jos Verstappen, who in the mid-90s at Benetton was Michael Schumacher’s number 2, agrees that Vettel should be playing that role now.

“Purely mathematically, he has a chance to be champion. But as a team they really have to put everything behind Webber.

“He (Webber) has a better chance of winning the title,” the Dutchman wrote in his column for De Telegraaf newspaper.

“Of course it’s a difficult position for Red Bull, as the whole world knows who they would prefer to be in the best position.

“It’s unfortunate for Vettel, but with his engine failure in Korea his championship did literally go up in smoke,” added Verstappen.

But Horner sounds unlikely to have a change of heart, telling the BBC he finds it “frustrating” that 7 points of leader Alonso’s 11 point lead was due to inheriting the German grand prix win from his teammate Massa.

“It (losing the title to Alonso) would be frustrating because we’ve obviously worked under the auspices that team orders have been illegal,” he told BBC radio.

Nelson Piquet Jr has defended Felipe Massa after the Ferrari driver allowed Fernando Alonso to win Sunday’s German grand prix.

In the wake of the Hockenheim team orders affair, the Brazilian media has been hard on 29-year-old Massa, who according to some publications displayed a lack of courage on the anniversary of his 2009 crash.

Heavily criticised last year was Piquet, who argued he was ordered by Flavio Briatore to deliberately crash his Renault during the 2008 Singapore grand prix in order to bring out the safety car and boost Alonso’s chances of winning.

“Talk is cheap and it’s easy to criticise,” Piquet, now driving in NASCAR’s lower-tier truck series, is quoted by Globo Esporte.

“But the hole is deeper than you think.”

Indeed, Massa has been quoted in Brazil as saying “many drivers” would have acted similarly in his shoes at Hockenheim, and after leaving Ferrari, Rubens Barrichello revealed that he would have lost his job had he not moved over for Michael Schumacher in 2002.

Mika Salo subbed for an injured Schumacher at Ferrari in 1999, and he tells Finland’s Turun Sanomat that “they made it clear that if Eddie (Irvine) is behind me, my job is to give space”.

At that year’s German grand prix, Salo was leading the race.

“I looked in the mirrors and then I saw that Eddie overtook Frentzen.  After a couple of seconds Ross Brawn came on the radio and said Mika, we want you to let Eddie go.

“I think it makes sense that Ferrari sees Alonso with clearly a better chance for the title.  But it could have been managed quite a lot better, especially when the engineer asked Massa if he understood what he had to do,” said Salo.

In his El Pais column, Epsilon Euskadi chief Joan Villadelprat agrees that the team order was a flagrant rule breach.

“Of course, it was very clear.  He (Massa) was left with no choice.  All the fans knew it immediately, although it is possible the World Council will fail to demonstrate it.

“I remember in 2002 that Barrichello received a threat that it would trouble his contract if he did not budge.

“I think the worst damage is not the fine or a penalty, but that the brilliant work on the team and the drivers to catch up to Red Bull was spoiled by unnecessarily unsportsmanlike conduct.

“Ferrari’s errors this year have been too many and too large.  Someone has to take some action, to tell the team leaders that it’s enough.

“And someone should calm down Fernando, so that he doesn’t repeat comments like ‘This is ridiculous’ the first time he tried to pass Massa.

“We’re taking about a double world champion, the best driver in the paddock, a title contender, but on occasion it is necessary to put his brakes on,” added Spaniard Villadelprat.

Epsilon Euskadi has a better chance of winning a spot on the formula one grid now that Max Mosley has departed.

That is the suggestion of Carlos Gracia, the head of Spain’s motor racing federation.

He told the Marca sports newspaper that the Spanish outfit has the “best facilities” of the other hopefuls but still missed out on a 2010 debut to HRT, Virgin and Lotus.

“When the old FIA granted the licenses to be in formula one it was done with haste and with not accurately assessing the infrastructure.

“I think and I hope that now it will be different,” added Gracia, referring to the appointment of Jean Todt as the new FIA president.

1996 world champion Damon Hill, who acted as a steward in Monaco last weekend as part of a Todt initiative, also backs the sport’s new regime.

“I think we’ve come through a phase in formula one history that has been quite turbulent,” he told GP Week.

“Now things seem to have settled down and we’re focusing again on racing.  That’s the way it should be.

“Before, it was like having a film director who wanted to be in his own film,” added Hill.

(GMM)