Rubens Barrichello says there is no way he would accept Brawn GP using team orders to favour Jenson Button, but he is confident that he is being given equal opportunities at present.The Brazilian lost yesterday's Spanish Grand Prix to his championship-leading team-mate after Button was switched to a two-stop strategy mid-race and Barrichello failed to pull out a big enough gap to beat the Briton on his three-stop plan.
Still harbouring unhappy memories of having to obey team orders when alongside Michael Schumacher at Ferrari in 2000-05, Barrichello said he simply wouldn't be racing for Brawn if he thought the same situation applied."If I get the slightest sniff of the fact that they have favoured Jenson, I will hang up my helmet tomorrow," he told US broadcaster SPEED.
"But I know Ross wouldn't do that."He asked me to drive for him and he knows I want to race fairly with Jenson."
In the press conference Barrichello said he had vowed never to accept team orders again after his frustrations at Ferrari, when he famously had to hand Schumacher first place in the 2002 Austrian GP within yards of the finish."I'm very experienced with that, and if that happens, I won't follow any team orders any more," the veteran insisted.
"I'm making it clear now, so everybody knows."It's much different to how it used to be at Ferrari.
"We have a much more friendly situation, so I'm not sitting down on the side blaming this or that."It's in the best interests of myself to learn what went wrong because I had the ability to win the race but I didn't and this is a full stop.
"Jenson is on a flier and he's doing very well."There's a bit more pressure on my side, obviously, because he's won four races and I've won nothing but I'm there, I'm working and I won't stop working."
Button also dismissed any hint of team orders having been imposed and insisted Barrichello had been expected to win the race."Our strategy said that a three-stop was quicker, full stop," he said.
"We're all here to win; it went my way today and it might go Rubens's way in Monaco, and that's just the way it is."He had a problem in his stint and I didn't.
"I made it work and I won the race today but you know that can swing around at the next race and that's the way we go racing and that's the way racing should be and I think it has been, within most teams in Formula 1."I don't ever want to go down that avenue of talking about [team orders] because it's so far from the situation within our team."
Team boss Ross Brawn was adamant that Barrichello lost the race due to a lack of speed in his third stint rather than any team orchestration."Rubens was quite slow [in that stint], much slower than we anticipated and what he could or should have been doing," he told the BBC.
"That was the crucial bit of the race that really spoiled it for him, because until then he was looking good [to beat] Jenson."We were choosing a strategy for Rubens to win the race.
"It's very early in the championship, and both drivers are driving for it."As you saw at the beginning of the race, they've got freedom – the only rule is don't knock each other off."
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