If you are told to withhold the truth, you have to use your good sense. If go ahead with the team instructions, you are as guilty as the team. It works like this for the rest of the world and it should be no different for Lewis.

Lewis’s apology was something he had to do to rescue his image. Whether he was sorry that he did it, or that he was caught, is debatable. He blamed Dave Ryan and did not even admit that he should have known better.

With Mclaren, he was given many opportunities and has achieved his dreams. You have to take the good and the bad. For him to leave the team when they have made some mistakes, or when they are down, would be ungrateful, and would reflect badly on Lewis as a person.

I am sure suddenly lots of people will look at 2007 in a different way… but anyway, terrible management by a powerful team. With such monumental amount of money in the spot it is unbeliavable that they made such a huge mistake.

Francois, I think you are quite right to point out all of those strategy errors McLaren have made in the past few years. McLaren seem to stumble from one blunder to the next, and you have to wonder quite why things have unravelled so spectacularly in the past few years.

Too often the rules are unclear and/or interpreted by the stewards in inexplicable ways so it is no wonder that McLaren are paranoid, having suffered from far too many bad decisions in the past.

Interesting you post that – I’ve always been under the impression since Hungary 07′ that McLaren seem to have some serious issues as a team which seem to have severely compromised their decision making (far too conservative) on quite a few occasions.A few occurances particularly stick in my mind: (I know it’s easy to sit on a PC and write this when I’m not making the decisions )

China 07 – Hamilton is kept out on worn rear tyres while it’s quite obvious to all watching he desperately needs to be brought in (severe drop off in lap times).When they do bring him in he runs wide because the right rear tyre is destroyed to the canvas.The rest is history.

Brazil 07 – Team chooses a extremely aggressive three stop strategy after Hamilton has intermittent transmission failure running him on softer tyres which fell away very quickly in ultimate laptime.

Silverstone 08? – Took in my view quite a gamble not putting Lewis onto full wet tyres during delug like Honda did with Barrichello

Hockenheim 08 – like you mentioned , the team did not react to a SC being deployed fast enough to bring him in , left him P4/P5 after restart.

Italy 08 – Poor timing with sending Lewis out on inters on a track which was clearly too wet for him to get any kind of tyre temp with steadily increasing rainfall.(Hope this doesn’t happen tomorrow)

Brazil 08 – Dangerously conservative strategy , there was a part in that race when Hamilton didn’t seem to be pushing on in P4 when I felt he should have closed on Kimi and built a gap away from the car behind him.Team did not react quickly to put Lewis on dry tyres again after initial shower.