Blog: Many, including me, applauded Mark Webber on Sunday, writes Richard Craig.

Not literally of course: standing up and clapping in an otherwise empty flat is one slippery step closer to being led away by the mental health authorities, but I was highly impressed when he ignored the orders of his Red Bull team and tried his damnedest to get past his team mate Sebastian Vettel in the closing stages of the British Grand Prix.

Often truculent, but never reticent, the Australian thrives when he is on the back foot. Just look at last year when you got the impression that the Red Bull management would have grabbed the burger out of his hand in the staff canteen and given it to his German partner because it contained more cheese. He was on many occasions the man to beat. And ironically, when he was doing well, the defensive adrenaline subsided and he slid out of contention for the title.

This year, it’s all been quite friendly, up to now anyway. Why? The simple fact is that favouritism has not been an issue. If Webber did want to gripe to someone he’d be advised to call into his nearest church and ask the Big Man why Vettel is hogging all the talent. Mark has been demoted, by nothing other than his own pace, into the role of the ‘number two driver’ he considered himself to be in 2010.

But with Webber’s increased pace at Silverstone, a track he loves, came a headache for Dietrich Mateschitz and team boss Christian Horner. Oh yeah, this F1 business requires two of our employees to battle each other. Bugger. That’s no good.

It reminds me of Clive James memorably saying of inter-team racing in 1982: ‘The public love it, but it makes team bosses nervous.’ Some things, as Murray Walker noted in the commentary box after the race, don’t change.

In my own blog after the race, I expressed my frustration that the only overriding consideration for the powers that be in F1 is making sure their paymasters’ noses are kept firmly in joint. Racing drivers are only befitting of their titles when it suits the man on the other end of the pit-to-car radio, and if there is a risk that the two cars will be advertising taurine-injected fizzy drinks from an upside-down position in a gravel trap the big fight to the finish is called off.

So good on Webber for developing selective aural problems in the closing stages and taking the fight to the line. The number of spectators who wanted him to overtake Vettel rather outweighed the handful of team employees who didn’t.

Of course, F1 loves such scandals and this one is infinitely more interesting that the gibberish about hot and cold blown diffusers, to which nobody with any pure love of racing paid any attention. This is much more the type of thing the public relish.

On a couple of prior occasions in the 1980s, drivers such as Carlos Reutemann, Didier Pironi and Rene Arnoux upset their team leaders at Williams, Ferrari and Renault by mysteriously deciding they would rather win a race than finish second, despite team orders applying. And some right royal rows resulted.

That’s the way it should be.