Silverstone Red Bull were facing accusations of rank civil war on Sunday after an extraordinary British Grand Prix won by Australia's Mark Webber ended with the one half of the team's garage allegedly taunting the other with a body part from the winning car.
The mutinous atmosphere that prevailed inside the Red Bull camp was the dominant narrative from a baking-hot day at Silverstone in which the championship battle took another intriguing twist, but it was hardly the only one.
Lewis Hamilton delighted the 115,000-strong crowd by extending his lead in the drivers' championship to 12 points over teammate Jenson Button with a solid drive to second, but it is McLaren's reigning world champion who will be the happier this morning, having kept his title hopes alive by surging from 14th on the grid to fourth, so claiming 12 valuable points.
Then there was Fernando Alonso, who for the second race running was caught out by a controversial stewards' decision and ended up out of the points.
Total domination
Ferrari's pre-season favourite is fast running out of time to make his move in 2010, although the Spaniard remained defiant afterwards.
Above all, though, it was the Red Bull row that captured the imagination. Incensed by the team's decision to remove a new front wing from his car and put it on that of Sebastian Vettel for qualifying the previous day, a fired-up Webber muscled his teammate off the track at the first corner and went on to dominate the race. As he crossed the finish line, he alerted the world to the simmering tensions that reside within the Milton Keynes-based team with seven fateful words: "Not bad for a number two driver."
Red Bull's team principal Christian Horner would later try to shrug off the remark but the damage had already been done.
No more reading between the lines. Webber had hinted ambiguously at team favouritism after qualifying on Saturday that the team had "got the result they wanted" with Vettel pipping him to pole, but now the gloves were well and truly off.
Even as Horner was trying to defuse the febrile atmosphere, over in the drivers' conference, Webber was firing off both barrels for those who hadn't already got the message.
"I would never have signed a contract for next year if I believed that was the way going forward," he said.
Extraordinary stuff
"I was disa ppointed [with what happened on Saturday]. We will see how it goes in the future, I will keep doing what I am doing and I hope it is enough"
It was extraordinary stuff. But perhaps not as extraordinary as the alleged shenanigans in the pitlane below him where Horner's worst nightmares were apparently unfolding.
Webber's mechanics were said to have removed the ‘old' front wing that Webber had been forced to race with and waved it at Vettel's side of the garage.
They, just as much as Webber, had been angered by the apparent favouritism shown by Red Bull's management and were not afraid to show the world their simmering resentment.
This is now a serious problem and one that threatens to derail Red Bull's title ambitions. The Milton Keynes-based team had enjoyed the focus on McLaren's drivers in the build-up to the race — and had even tried to stir the pot with talk of "smoke and mirrors" — but the truth is that the antagonism which first exploded to life in Turkey back in May is far more poisonous.
