Hamilton wants rules of engagement. Formula 1 deleted its own in December 2010 and never wrote another.

Hamilton wants rules of engagement. Formula 1 deleted its own in December 2010 and never wrote another..

Lewis Hamilton spent the hours after the Italian Grand Prix describing a document that does not exist. "I think it comes down to rules of engagement," he told Sky Sports F1. "When I was at Mercedes, we had written rules of engagement." Then the sentence that travelled: "Here, there are no rules. We need to address that."

He meant Ferrari, and he meant the Turn 1 contact with Charles Leclerc that his team mate later conceded "went too far". Read against the rulebook rather than against the garage, though, the complaint lands somewhere he did not aim it. The sport itself has no rules of engagement either. It had one, for a stretch of the 2000s, and it repealed it deliberately.

Section B of the 2026 FIA Formula 1 Regulations is the sporting section, 98 pages in Issue 08, published on 5 August 2026 and approved by the World Motor Sport Council two days before that. Search the whole of it, case insensitive, for "team order" and every variant of it, and the count is zero. The same search returns zero across Section A and Section F of the same regulation set. To be sure the result was an absence rather than a broken extraction, every one of the 98 pages was read and every occurrence of the bare word "order" was checked: 116 of them, all of the form "in order to" and "the order in which".

Article B1.8, headed "Driving", is where the rule would live if it lived anywhere. It runs to nine sub-articles and the first of them, B1.8.1, is the closest the document comes: "The driver must drive the F1 Car alone and unaided." That governs whether somebody else can steer the car, not whether somebody else can tell the driver what to do with it. The remaining eight cover flame-resistant clothing, flag and light signals, driving unnecessarily slowly, track limits, structurally damaged cars and abandoned ones. What a driver owes the other car in the same colours is not among a driver's regulated obligations.

Formula 1 has not always been quiet on this. A prohibition ran in the Sporting Regulations through the second half of the 2000s, moving from Article 147 to Article 39.1 for the 2007 season without a word of it changing. In the edition of 23 June 2010, the one in force that summer, it sat at Article 39.1 under the heading "39) THE RACE" and read in full: "Team orders which interfere with a race result are prohibited." Ten words, and they were enough to charge under.

Hockenheim killed it. The stewards of the 2010 German Grand Prix fined Ferrari US$100,000 for the radio call that moved Felipe Massa aside for Fernando Alonso and referred the file upward. On 8 September 2010 the Judging Body of the World Motor Sport Council sat in Paris, confirmed the fine, added the FIA's costs, imposed no further sporting penalty and left the result standing. In the same statement, reproduced at length by RaceFans, it acknowledged "that article 39.1 of the Sporting Regulations should be reviewed" and sent the question to the Formula One Sporting Working Group. A body that had just enforced a rule used its own decision to ask whether the rule should survive.

Monaco settled it three months later. The World Motor Sport Council met there on 10 December 2010 and deleted the article, and the 2011 Sporting Regulations issued that day carry no trace of it. The number was not left vacant as a monument. In that same 2011 edition, 39.1 already reads on the green light at the end of the pit lane, the article beneath it having simply moved up. Teams were told instead, per the decision list published by Adam Cooper, that "any actions liable to bring the sport into disrepute are dealt with under Article 151c of the International Sporting Code and any other relevant provisions".

Article 151c is now Article 12.2.1.c, renumbered and otherwise untouched, and it is worth reading at its real width. In the International Sporting Code applied from 26 June 2026 it covers "any fraudulent conduct or any act prejudicial to the interests of any Competition or to the interests of motor sport generally". Its neighbour 12.2.1.m reaches "any infringement of the principles of fairness in Competition, behaviour in an unsportsmanlike manner or attempt to influence the result of a Competition in a way that is contrary to sporting ethics". Both are written to catch fraud and disrepute. Neither offers a pit wall anything it could apply in the seconds before one of its cars decides whether to defend against the other.

One F1-specific obligation does survive, and its wording repays attention. Article A3.1.3(f) of Section A, issue 03 of 25 June 2026, binds an entrant to use "all reasonable endeavours to procure that its F1 Cars complete each Competition in active competition with other F1 Teams in order to achieve the highest position possible in the Championship". The undertaking is to race, and it points outward. A team that decides its two cars will not race each other has not touched it.

Intra-team racing is therefore governed by whatever each team says governs it, and the two teams whose drivers spent Monza fighting each other have landed in different places. Andrea Stella gave McLaren's reasoning on 7 September in the form of a condition: "And the two cars were on the same tyres, same tyre age, same car. So we thought there was no need to interfere with the normal development of the race. We let them race." Equipment parity is something a person outside the team could in principle check, and it carried a decision that held while Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri came home fourth and fifth.

McLaren's own review, it is worth being exact about, is not a review of that. Stella scoped it to the moment Norris put two wheels on the grass, which on second look he called "much more benign than what it might have looked in the heat of the moment", and to a strategic question about whether the pair could have attacked Max Verstappen better. He restated the philosophy in the same answer rather than reopening it.

Ferrari has no equivalent to restate. Fred Vasseur was asked directly and answered in the conditional: "Now to see if we have a team order or whatever." He argued that a decision before Monza would have been premature, citing McLaren's 2025 season as the counterexample, and committed to exactly one thing: "Now we have time to discuss with the guys." No date and no venue attached. Hamilton, asked separately when the change would come, put it past Madrid on 13 September: "probably not for next week, but particularly after the next race to try and look how we can procedurally do things different". On the drivers' own timetable, the first corner at Madrid was always going to be taken under the old arrangement, which is to say under none.

There is a quieter problem inside the thing Hamilton is asking for. The Mercedes rules of engagement he remembers were written, and they were also private. No steward read them, no rival could test whether they had been followed, and no spectator ever saw the text. That is the entire category of instrument the sport left itself when it repealed Article 39.1: a rule whose author, interpreter, enforcer and only reader is the team it constrains. Ferrari can write one in a fortnight. Nobody outside Maranello will ever be able to tell whether it held.