The media is full of a spat between Lewis and Nico. One of the F1 para-sites invited its readers to take part in a poll to 'decide' whether Nico had deliberately ruined Lewis's chances of pole at Monaco, as if the opinion of couch potatoes counted for anything.
It does not matter what any of us think. The stewards saw the on-car data and made their decision.
I have no idea how things stand between the two Mercedes drivers who had been pals most of their lives. What I do know is history. What we are now seeing is amateur history. Hamilton and Rosberg are being compared to Prost and Senna.
If you want real rivalry you go back to the prewar Mercedes-Benz team. Luigi Fagioli hated Rudolf Caracciola and Manfred von Brauchitsch because of team orders. Fagioli twice got so frustrated that he abandoned a perfectly good car, once in the pits, once on the track so it was useless.
All three drivers hated their team-mate, Hermann Lang, because he was working class. It was as if a private had been allowed to dine in the Officers' Mess with no idea how to use a fish knife. It did not matter that, by 1939, Lang was the star of the team.
Caracciola persuaded Mercedes-Benz to give a drive to Louis Chiron in 1936; they were both shagging the same woman. Chiron turned down her proposals of marriage, but she eventually married Rudi.
Fagioli so hated Caracciola that he tried to kill him. After one race, he threw a tyre hammer at Rudi's head, who ducked just in time. Fagioli was escorted from the pit in tears.
That is what I call history.
Read some people and you would think that Tazio Nuvolari was the greatest driver of the prewar era. It's a slam dunk, except it ain't.
Italian opinion was divided between the cool, aristocratic, Achille Varzi and the small, wiry, peasant, Nuvolari. Fans took sides according to their preferences and prejudices. The two men appeared to be opposites, yet they were close friends.
Nuvolari and Varzi set up their own team for a while, but they soon felt that their rivalry was damaging their friendship, which they held more highly, so they went their separate ways. The media had them as being at each other's throats because that whipped up interest.
They played along with it, it meant they could negotiate better appearance money.
In Britain, in the 1950s, the media struck up Moss vs Hawthorn. Mike was the tall blond, often pictured with a pint in his hand and a pipe in his mouth. Stirling was the short, intense, professional. Each appealed to a different audience. They were never friends, but they were on friendly terms and understood the value of the media's story of their rivalry.
When the German teams entered Grand Prix racing in 1934, with Nazi backing, they were each allowed an Italian driver. Auto Union chose Varzi, Mercedes-Benz chose Luigi Fagioli, Nuvolari was left at home.
Nuvolari had announced his retirement, and was on a ship to America in 1938, when he received a cable asking him to join Auto Union. Varzi had become addicted to morphine and was out of it. Varzi had been shagging a team-mate's wife who had become addicted to morphine following a bad road accident.
Nuvolari was spectacular in the 1938 Donington GP and became idolised by the handful of British journalists from whom American writers, notably Ken W. Purdy, took their cue. A legend grew that Nuvolari was the undisputed king of prewar racing.
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