And without the miscue in Abu Dhabi that left Alonso toiling behind Vitaly Petrov, a narrow title victory over Vettel would have only justified it further.Now 41 and driving for Aston Martin, F1’s self-anointed anti-hero is ready to be a force at the front once again. Harsh as it may have been, Ferrari did the right thing at Hockenheim. But the fact he would never come as close to winning a grand prix again only makes Ferrari's call seem all the more cruel.

Williams would give Massa some late-career success, taking a handful of podiums and that shock pole at the 2014 Austrian Grand Prix. But even without that, the results made it hard to argue any other way. He was typecast in his final years at Ferrari as Alonso's number two, with much of that feeling coming from the incident at Hockenheim. It would prove to be the closest Massa would get to a post-accident victory in F1. It often takes hard, unpopular decisions that push the rules to their limits - something Ferrari had a knack for at the peak of its success. But title wins in F1 are rarely built on sentimentality. Victory for Massa would have been a wonderful story, coming a year to the day since his accident in qualifying for the Hungarian Grand Prix that left him with head injuries. The difference was the presence of the hard-to-police regulation in 2010 saying it was not allowed. Since then, we've seen far more open and needless uses of team orders - take Valtteri Bottas' gifting of the 2018 Russian Grand Prix to Lewis Hamilton - which are now widely accepted.

It became abundantly clear to F1's rulemakers they could not police team orders, prompting the removal of the regulation at the end of the season. Sure, that was the championship decider, but realistically, was Massa going to win the 2010 title? No - and victory ahead of Alonso would not have changed that. The clearest example came again at expense of Massa at the 2007 Brazilian Grand Prix, when the strategy was altered to allow Kimi Raikkonen to get ahead. It was hardly the first time Ferrari had prioritised one driver over the other to help their title hopes.

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