Following the #BTCC feed on Twitter during yesterday’s final race of the British Touring Car Championship season, the animosity towards VX Racing, and Matt Neal in particular, was incredible. The reason? Team orders: Matt Neal was charged with holding up Team RAC‘s Colin Turkington to give his VX Racing team-mate Fabrizio Giovanardi a chance of overtaking and sealing the championship.

Team orders was the exact reason that Team RAC brought in Anthony Reid to boost their squad to three cars, after VX Racing put their other two drivers behind Giovanardi. VX Racing were much better at using such tactics, but happily the championship didn’t come down to that.

It begs the question: what will we, the fans, accept in the way of team orders?

Neal’s snail-pace driving in the lead of the third race yesterday frustrated me as much as anyone. But I had no problem with Dani Sordo slowing down in the Spanish round of the World Rally Championship at the weekend to let Sebastien Loeb take the rally win.

The difference, I suppose, is who is being disadvantaged by the team orders.

If it’s another member of the same team, as in the case of Sordo and Loeb, then I don’t have any particular objection. It’s not great, but in a team sport, it’s to be expected. What I don’t like seeing is a team order to disadvantage a competitor, as in the case of Neal and Turkington. That’s just not fair, is it?

But even team orders that only affect the same team can be objectionable if they’re extreme.

Perhaps the most famous example of recent years was Rubens Barrichello moving over for Ferrari team-mate Michael Schumacher in the last stretch of the 2002 Austrian Grand Prix. The lot of them were fined for the ridiculous scenes on the podium, when Schumacher pushed Barrichello up to the top step of the podium, but the team orders were perfectly legal. Fans were outraged by the blatent nature of the orders though, and the fiasco led to the ‘banning’ of team orders in Formula 1. Mind you, in practice it just means that teams have to be more subtle about it.

There was a perhaps even more blatent display earlier this year in one of the Portugese rounds of the World Touring Car Championship. The BMWs of Andy Priaulx and Jorg Muller dropped right back out of the points from 4th and 7th respectively, just so that Augusto Farfus, the top BMW in the championship, could pick up a single point for 8th. It was ludicrous.