To paralyse a Formula 1 team with fear, put those in charge into a position where they must impose team orders. The result will be ham-fisted attempts to look like no team orders exist, followed by all sorts of verbal contortions and semantic arguments as they try to convince the rest of the world that something that very obviously happened did not.
Why? Because team orders at their mildest are unavoidable and at their most extreme are blindingly obvious. It's part of motorsport, and F1's regulations actively encourage it. To name but one rule, each team has a single pit box so that inevitably means there are times where you must favour one driver over the other with stop timing.
Different drivers have different balance preferences and often a team will have to choose one development path or another that might favour or hinder one of its drivers. As we saw at Monza, even the decision of which driver goes out ahead of the other in qualifying can lead to accusations of favouritism.
Motorsport's blend of human and machine competition makes it uniquely complex, and with complexity comes much of the intrigue. It's never a battle of one gladiator versus another, it's a battle of the individual in the cockpit and however many are behind them - whether it's hundreds of people in a grand prix team or a handful at a lower level, making what happens on track the product of countless influences and variables. It's that complexity that makes it so endlessly fascinating.
There's a very simple reason why F1 is so terrified of team orders - the 2002 Austrian Grand Prix. What Ferrari did there, with Rubens Barrichello letting Michael Schumacher past on the run to the line, was an egregiously unnecessary example of team orders.
After all, it was only the sixth race of the season and made the difference between Schumacher having a 23 or a 27-point advantage in the world championship. It was unnecessary and, most reprehensibly, appallingly implemented.
While Ferrari was fined $1million, this was actually not as a result of what happened on track but instead after the race. Ferrari was done for a breach of podium ceremony regulations, with a sheepish Schumacher swapping places on the rostrum with Barrichello the reason found for punishment.
The argument that motorsport should be a 'fair' sporting competition is laudable but impractical
The FIA World Motor Sport Council stated it "deplored the manner in which team orders were given and executed at the Austrian Grand Prix". But it also acknowledged that drivers were contractually bound to follow orders, and "recognised the long-standing and traditional right of a team to decree the finishing order of its drivers".
But there was also a more serious response, and this was a classic kneejerk: a ban on team orders instigated for the 2003 season. It was a great piece of crowd-pleasing populism, but like many such moves it was meaningless and ultimately counterproductive. It created an environment where teams had to lie and insult the intelligence of everyone watching when situations were clearly manipulated.
The sporting regulation, article 39.1, stated simply that "team orders which interfere with a race result are prohibited".
Even in that period, there were times when team orders were permitted. For example, most felt Ferrari had ensured Kimi Raikkonen jumped Felipe Massa in the second pit sequence of the 2007 Brazilian GP to take the victory he needed to win the title. It was subtler than an on-track choreographed 'pass' but still it seemed that when the championship was on the line in a final race, the team orders rule suddenly did not apply. A clear and confusing double standard.
It took a long time for that regulation to be tested, and when it was it crumbled to dust. When Ferrari ordered Fernando Alonso past Massa to win the 2010 German GP via the famous "Fernando is faster than you" series of messages, the stewards fined Ferrari $100,000 for breaching that rule. The case went to the World Motor Sport Council, but although Ferrari could potentially have been excluded the penalty was unchanged.
Most significantly, the WMSC also referred that regulation to the F1 sporting working group, meaning article 39.1 is no more (to be precise, an article of that number does exist, but it now relates to safety car procedures).
Why? Because the FIA and everyone else involved recognised it was unworkable. Worse still, it actively forced teams and drivers to lie through their teeth. The post-race press conference at Hockenheim that year was excruciating for exactly that reason as question after question was batted away by the two drivers.
This was far worse than what had happened on track. Had Ferrari been able to explain the circumstances, simply pointing out the championship situation and the difficulty of overtaking in what was still the pre-DRS era, people would have grumbled but accepted it.
Similarly, when Ferrari stand-in Mika Salo let Eddie Irvine past to win the 1999 German GP, many fans didn't like it but at least they didn't have to listen to endless answers denying it had happened. The number one rule for all sports is do not insult the intelligence of the public.
Yet, unshackled from the regulated need to be dishonest, teams continue to behave as if being misleading is mandatory.
The Mercedes team has taken a sound approach to team orders in general over the past 18 months, invoking them only when necessary and genuinely uncomfortable with having to do so.
At Monza, it was clear that Valtteri Bottas's strategy was partly influenced by the race situation ahead, although team boss Toto Wolff stressed that he hadn't been sacrificed to help Hamilton because running longer than Max Verstappen, once the undercut was off the table, was the correct strategy to achieve a tyre life offset and allow a potential later pass.
That is true, but Bottas was also given an emphatic instruction to keep Raikkonen behind and given the stakes it made sense to keep the non-title-chasing Mercedes in the part of the track where it would be a factor when Raikkonen did pit. Hence taking the undercut on Verstappen was always unlikely.
Bottas did a great job, the team got the strategy exactly right and there's no problem in acknowledging that fact. Mercedes doesn't want to sacrifice constructors' championship points after all, and Hamilton won the race while Bottas did get third place. Excellent work.
Over at Ferrari, Sebastian Vettel has said that he doesn't want team orders to help him, yet clearly he enjoys having Raikkonen in a supporting role. He's Ferrari's sole championship shot, and it would be perfectly logical to ensure he had everything he needed to do to maximise his chances of winning.
And does anyone really think Vettel had not wanted Raikkonen to put up a fight into the first corner at Monza? He'd have been very happy had Raikkonen let him past into the first chicane, and with a rear gunner in place would have had every chance of winning the race - and Ferrari might have cause to regret not making such an order.
Ferrari's policy of rotating running order in Q3 is laudable, but once one driver is effectively out of the picture - and even though at Monza Raikkonen was still mathematically a potential title factor, in real terms he wasn't - then favour the other.
Mercedes also did this at Spa, when the penalty-laden Bottas got through to Q3 purely to be available to give Hamilton a tow. That's just sound team management.
Ferrari could look to a better moment in its own past when it comes to this, both in terms of what it does and the way it communicates. A positive example came at the United States GP in 2012, the first at Austin's Circuit of the Americas, when Ferrari was clear about its tactics. There, Massa had qualified seventh and Alonso ninth only for Ferrari to break a seal on the former's gearbox even though there was no damage.
The result was a five-place grid penalty that moved Alonso up to eighth, on the clean side of the grid, and relegated Massa to 12th.
Team orders are a necessary fact of life. Used responsibility, and openly, they can actually enhance the spectacle of motorsport
"The reason for this [penalty] was for strategy considerations, with the objective of maximising Alonso's start potential given that he's still in with a chance to win the drivers' championship," said a Ferrari statement.
"We saw yesterday that starting from the dirty side of the track would have been penalising: there was a significant risk of finding ourselves too far behind the leaders at the end of the first lap."
This was a season during which Alonso was performing heroically to stay in the hunt for the world championship in a Ferrari that simply wasn't as quick as Vettel's Red Bull. All credit to Ferrari for being honest about what it did. Would anyone prefer that a gearbox change be triggered amid talk of a fictional problem?
And while Ferrari did require a little pressure to release that statement, in the end it achieved its objectives, played to the rules and did not insult the intelligence of those watching.
You could argue Ferrari is in a similar position now, as although it has had a pure pace advantage over Mercedes in nine out of 14 events this year, Vettel is now 30 points behind Hamilton.
Both Raikkonen and Bottas can be kingmakers and provided they are used legitimately and things don't overstep the mark - for example, it would be reprehensible to wipe out an opponent deliberately - there's nothing wrong with that.
There's also a nobility in a driver setting aside personal aspirations for the greater glory of the team. Peter Collins is celebrated for handing his car over to Juan Manuel Fangio in the 1956 Italian GP to help his Ferrari team-mate win the title.
Then, Collins still had an outside chance of the championship and is famed for falling into line with the team hierarchy. Luigi Musso, who refused to hand over his car, is generally portrayed negatively.
Throughout history, there have been formalised number one/number two deals in place. Ronnie Peterson, for example, was categorically number two to Mario Andretti in 1978 and was expected to support him. He, too, is celebrated for his nobility in acting in line with the terms of a deal that he had explicitly agreed to.
The old days with pre-ordained hierarchies in teams is going a little too far. But there's nothing wrong with team orders being utilised in a championship battle once an order is established.
There is a right way and a wrong way to use team orders. Pre-ordaining the result from the start of the season is not the way to go, and in the case of Mercedes should Bottas have a stellar first half of the season next year and pull 80 points clear of Hamilton, then he should become the focus if there is a title at stake.
But what must not be allowed to happen again is the mendacity that reigns when teams pretend team orders have not been used. Teams should be open and honest about what has happened.
There will always be criticism on social media whatever happens - even when team orders don't exist, the fans of a beaten driver will usually dream them up - but provided teams do not go too far and recreate Austria 2002 it is perfectly acceptable.
Sports such as cycling are very open about the status of riders on teams, and one of the fascinations of watching a road race is understanding the role of the domestiques and lead-out riders, who are there to facilitate victory not for themselves, but for their strongest team-mate.
F1 is about teams as well as drivers, and in any sporting contest you want to see those competing using all tools at their disposal to fight as hard as possible to win.
The complexity of motorsport means that there will always be decisions to be made that could favour one driver or another and to pretend this is not the case is an oversimplification that can only be damaging.
Team orders are a necessary fact of life. Used responsibility, and openly, they can actually enhance the spectacle of motorsport. But used clandestinely, which they will be, history has proved them to be a recipe for disaster and dishonesty.
To paralyse a Formula 1 team with fear, put those in charge into a position where they must impose team orders. The result will be ham-fisted attempts to look like no team orders exist, followed by all sorts of verbal contortions and semantic arguments as they try to convince the rest of the world that something that very obviously happened did not.
Why? Because team orders at their mildest are unavoidable and at their most extreme are blindingly obvious. It's part of motorsport, and F1's regulations actively encourage it. To name but one rule, each team has a single pit box so that inevitably means there are times where you must favour one driver over the other with stop timing.
Different drivers have different balance preferences and often a team will have to choose one development path or another that might favour or hinder one of its drivers. As we saw at Monza, even the decision of which driver goes out ahead of the other in qualifying can lead to accusations of favouritism.
Motorsport's blend of human and machine competition makes it uniquely complex, and with complexity comes much of the intrigue. It's never a battle of one gladiator versus another, it's a battle of the individual in the cockpit and however many are behind them - whether it's hundreds of people in a grand prix team or a handful at a lower level, making what happens on track the product of countless influences and variables. It's that complexity that makes it so endlessly fascinating.
There's a very simple reason why F1 is so terrified of team orders - the 2002 Austrian Grand Prix. What Ferrari did there, with Rubens Barrichello letting Michael Schumacher past on the run to the line, was an egregiously unnecessary example of team orders.
After all, it was only the sixth race of the season and made the difference between Schumacher having a 23 or a 27-point advantage in the world championship. It was unnecessary and, most reprehensibly, appallingly implemented.
While Ferrari was fined $1million, this was actually not as a result of what happened on track but instead after the race. Ferrari was done for a breach of podium ceremony regulations, with a sheepish Schumacher swapping places on the rostrum with Barrichello the reason found for punishment.
The argument that motorsport should be a 'fair' sporting competition is laudable but impractical
The FIA World Motor Sport Council stated it "deplored the manner in which team orders were given and executed at the Austrian Grand Prix". But it also acknowledged that drivers were contractually bound to follow orders, and "recognised the long-standing and traditional right of a team to decree the finishing order of its drivers".
But there was also a more serious response, and this was a classic kneejerk: a ban on team orders instigated for the 2003 season. It was a great piece of crowd-pleasing populism, but like many such moves it was meaningless and ultimately counterproductive. It created an environment where teams had to lie and insult the intelligence of everyone watching when situations were clearly manipulated.
The sporting regulation, article 39.1, stated simply that "team orders which interfere with a race result are prohibited".
Even in that period, there were times when team orders were permitted. For example, most felt Ferrari had ensured Kimi Raikkonen jumped Felipe Massa in the second pit sequence of the 2007 Brazilian GP to take the victory he needed to win the title. It was subtler than an on-track choreographed 'pass' but still it seemed that when the championship was on the line in a final race, the team orders rule suddenly did not apply. A clear and confusing double standard.
It took a long time for that regulation to be tested, and when it was it crumbled to dust. When Ferrari ordered Fernando Alonso past Massa to win the 2010 German GP via the famous "Fernando is faster than you" series of messages, the stewards fined Ferrari $100,000 for breaching that rule. The case went to the World Motor Sport Council, but although Ferrari could potentially have been excluded the penalty was unchanged.
Most significantly, the WMSC also referred that regulation to the F1 sporting working group, meaning article 39.1 is no more (to be precise, an article of that number does exist, but it now relates to safety car procedures).
Why? Because the FIA and everyone else involved recognised it was unworkable. Worse still, it actively forced teams and drivers to lie through their teeth. The post-race press conference at Hockenheim that year was excruciating for exactly that reason as question after question was batted away by the two drivers.
This was far worse than what had happened on track. Had Ferrari been able to explain the circumstances, simply pointing out the championship situation and the difficulty of overtaking in what was still the pre-DRS era, people would have grumbled but accepted it.
Similarly, when Ferrari stand-in Mika Salo let Eddie Irvine past to win the 1999 German GP, many fans didn't like it but at least they didn't have to listen to endless answers denying it had happened. The number one rule for all sports is do not insult the intelligence of the public.
Yet, unshackled from the regulated need to be dishonest, teams continue to behave as if being misleading is mandatory.
The Mercedes team has taken a sound approach to team orders in general over the past 18 months, invoking them only when necessary and genuinely uncomfortable with having to do so.
At Monza, it was clear that Valtteri Bottas's strategy was partly influenced by the race situation ahead, although team boss Toto Wolff stressed that he hadn't been sacrificed to help Hamilton because running longer than Max Verstappen, once the undercut was off the table, was the correct strategy to achieve a tyre life offset and allow a potential later pass.
That is true, but Bottas was also given an emphatic instruction to keep Raikkonen behind and given the stakes it made sense to keep the non-title-chasing Mercedes in the part of the track where it would be a factor when Raikkonen did pit. Hence taking the undercut on Verstappen was always unlikely.
Bottas did a great job, the team got the strategy exactly right and there's no problem in acknowledging that fact. Mercedes doesn't want to sacrifice constructors' championship points after all, and Hamilton won the race while Bottas did get third place. Excellent work.
Over at Ferrari, Sebastian Vettel has said that he doesn't want team orders to help him, yet clearly he enjoys having Raikkonen in a supporting role. He's Ferrari's sole championship shot, and it would be perfectly logical to ensure he had everything he needed to do to maximise his chances of winning.
And does anyone really think Vettel had not wanted Raikkonen to put up a fight into the first corner at Monza? He'd have been very happy had Raikkonen let him past into the first chicane, and with a rear gunner in place would have had every chance of winning the race - and Ferrari might have cause to regret not making such an order.
Ferrari's policy of rotating running order in Q3 is laudable, but once one driver is effectively out of the picture - and even though at Monza Raikkonen was still mathematically a potential title factor, in real terms he wasn't - then favour the other.
Mercedes also did this at Spa, when the penalty-laden Bottas got through to Q3 purely to be available to give Hamilton a tow. That's just sound team management.
Ferrari could look to a better moment in its own past when it comes to this, both in terms of what it does and the way it communicates. A positive example came at the United States GP in 2012, the first at Austin's Circuit of the Americas, when Ferrari was clear about its tactics. There, Massa had qualified seventh and Alonso ninth only for Ferrari to break a seal on the former's gearbox even though there was no damage.
The result was a five-place grid penalty that moved Alonso up to eighth, on the clean side of the grid, and relegated Massa to 12th.
Team orders are a necessary fact of life. Used responsibility, and openly, they can actually enhance the spectacle of motorsport
"The reason for this [penalty] was for strategy considerations, with the objective of maximising Alonso's start potential given that he's still in with a chance to win the drivers' championship," said a Ferrari statement.
"We saw yesterday that starting from the dirty side of the track would have been penalising: there was a significant risk of finding ourselves too far behind the leaders at the end of the first lap."
This was a season during which Alonso was performing heroically to stay in the hunt for the world championship in a Ferrari that simply wasn't as quick as Vettel's Red Bull. All credit to Ferrari for being honest about what it did. Would anyone prefer that a gearbox change be triggered amid talk of a fictional problem?
And while Ferrari did require a little pressure to release that statement, in the end it achieved its objectives, played to the rules and did not insult the intelligence of those watching.
You could argue Ferrari is in a similar position now, as although it has had a pure pace advantage over Mercedes in nine out of 14 events this year, Vettel is now 30 points behind Hamilton.
Both Raikkonen and Bottas can be kingmakers and provided they are used legitimately and things don't overstep the mark - for example, it would be reprehensible to wipe out an opponent deliberately - there's nothing wrong with that.
There's also a nobility in a driver setting aside personal aspirations for the greater glory of the team. Peter Collins is celebrated for handing his car over to Juan Manuel Fangio in the 1956 Italian GP to help his Ferrari team-mate win the title.
Then, Collins still had an outside chance of the championship and is famed for falling into line with the team hierarchy. Luigi Musso, who refused to hand over his car, is generally portrayed negatively.
Throughout history, there have been formalised number one/number two deals in place. Ronnie Peterson, for example, was categorically number two to Mario Andretti in 1978 and was expected to support him. He, too, is celebrated for his nobility in acting in line with the terms of a deal that he had explicitly agreed to.
The old days with pre-ordained hierarchies in teams is going a little too far. But there's nothing wrong with team orders being utilised in a championship battle once an order is established.
There is a right way and a wrong way to use team orders. Pre-ordaining the result from the start of the season is not the way to go, and in the case of Mercedes should Bottas have a stellar first half of the season next year and pull 80 points clear of Hamilton, then he should become the focus if there is a title at stake.
But what must not be allowed to happen again is the mendacity that reigns when teams pretend team orders have not been used. Teams should be open and honest about what has happened.
There will always be criticism on social media whatever happens - even when team orders don't exist, the fans of a beaten driver will usually dream them up - but provided teams do not go too far and recreate Austria 2002 it is perfectly acceptable.
Sports such as cycling are very open about the status of riders on teams, and one of the fascinations of watching a road race is understanding the role of the domestiques and lead-out riders, who are there to facilitate victory not for themselves, but for their strongest team-mate.
F1 is about teams as well as drivers, and in any sporting contest you want to see those competing using all tools at their disposal to fight as hard as possible to win.
The complexity of motorsport means that there will always be decisions to be made that could favour one driver or another and to pretend this is not the case is an oversimplification that can only be damaging.
Team orders are a necessary fact of life. Used responsibility, and openly, they can actually enhance the spectacle of motorsport. But used clandestinely, which they will be, history has proved them to be a recipe for disaster and dishonesty.