Mercedes feud: Monaco is just the start

Wandering around the Monaco paddock in the hours after qualifying last weekend it was hard to find many people who were totally convinced that Nico Rosberg had made just a simple mistake. While the majority of drivers and team bosses pleaded the 'Fifth Amendment' for public declarations, that they were so cautious in proffering their true opinion said all you really needed to know.

Indeed, when the microphones were put away, the notebooks closed up and the pens put down, it was clear there were a number of current drivers, former drivers and team bosses who had their suspicions Rosberg had run down the Mirabeau escape road on purpose.

Yet there was one argument for the defence that kept popping up: Rosberg could not have done it on purpose because he is too nice a chap.

"It doesn't seem the sort of thing that someone like Rosberg would do," one former GP winner said to me. "I would never have had the balls to do it - and I don't think he would either."

Yet while previous behaviour can often give us a pretty big clue about intention in such circumstances, it cannot give us the full answer. And when you scrape away at the dynamics of what is going on at Mercedes right now between Lewis Hamilton and Rosberg, you fast come to the conclusion that it ultimately does not matter whether the German did do it on purpose or not.

For the key to this affair is that the man in the other car believes he did. Hamilton thinks he was unfairly robbed. And that suspicion, irrespective of the truth, is enough to provide the spark that has fuelled an inferno.

Alain Prost remarked at the weekend that it would only take one small incident to trigger a collapse in relations between the two Mercedes drivers, just as 25 years ago his own partnership with Ayrton Senna turned toxic when he felt betrayed by Senna overtaking him on the run to Tosa on lap one at Imola.

On that occasion, Senna was convinced he had done no wrong - as he believed an agreement not to overtake there had only been in place for the first start of the race. From his viewpoint, a red flag for Gerhard Berger's crash had prompted a restart and voided the original deal. But whether or not he was deliberate in his intentions to rob his team-mate mattered little to where their relationship went. In the end, Prost felt cheated. Their rivalry turned sour because the trust had gone.

Prost and Senna fell out at Imola in 1989 © LAT

Those barriers of trust have slowly been broken down by Hamilton and Rosberg this year, with both men having reason to feel aggrieved by the actions of the other. In Bahrain, Rosberg was upset that Hamilton had squeezed him out at Turn 1 in their early battles. Later on, Hamilton was not too impressed that Rosberg had turned up the engine settings on his car, going against team protocol, in his bid to take the lead.

Just a fortnight ago in Spain, Rosberg found out that the British driver had turned up his engine mode to hold on to the lead, even though the drivers had been told not to.

Amid the row afterwards, sources suggest that Hamilton was mortified at accusations that he had effectively been accused of cheating, for he felt it was just part of an increasingly tough on-track battle where a driver is allowed to do all it takes to win.

It really was little wonder then that - amid increasing suspicions from both camps - things blew up in Monaco the way they did.

Ultimately, there is only one man who knows the full truth about what happened on that final Q3 lap; just as only Senna knew what the truth was at Imola 1989, or indeed Prost does about his turning in to the Suzuka chicane in that title showdown later that year.

Both Rosberg and Hamilton talked at the weekend about the desire to keep their title battle fair. But after Bahrain, Spain and Monaco, that now is simply a Utopian dream.

Neither man is ever going to be able to forget that there is scope for competitive betrayal; that the man in the other car is ready to step across a line of acceptable behaviour and will do whatever it takes to win.

This has all the hallmarks of a truly intense and epic one-team driver duel the likes of which could reach the heights of Senna/Prost.

The drama has only just begun.