The latest evidence would suggest otherwise. Hamilton has been a study in
simmering rage ever since his adversary sabotaged any hope of pole by
spinning, rather fortuitously, into a siding off Mirabeau corner to cue
waved yellow flags on his final flying lap. His mood darkened afresh on
Sunday after he spent the best part of two hours toiling, with mounting
futility, to reel in Rosberg on a circuit where an overtaking manoeuvre is
more fiendishly difficult to carry off than a heist at the local casino.
His monosyllabic replies to straightforward questions, coupled with radio
messages to the Mercedes garage that hinted at a perceived conspiracy behind
the timing of his first pit-stop, spoke of a man convinced he was wronged.
What did that outburst to his engineer – “I knew you wouldn’t call me in” –
mean? “I don’t remember.”
Why had he blurted out the previous evening that he would handle the tensions
with Rosberg in the same way Ayrton Senna had dealt with Alain Prost? “It
was just a joke.”
Did he believe that a conventional pit-stop, not made under safety car
conditions, might have enabled him to pass Rosberg? “It’s irrelevant.”
Would he consider going out for a pizza with his mate Nico? “I don’t really
have an answer for you there.”
Hamilton and Rosberg have taken such parallel paths in motor racing that, 15
years on from their karting jousts together, they live in the same opulent
apartment block on Monaco’s Avenue Princesse Grace. But it is hard to
imagine either of them calling around to see if the other has any spare tea
bags in the cupboard.
The duel has been emphatically drawn, with Hamilton’s body language easier to
decode than the safe he is storing in his alleged friend’s flat. Smiling
wanly, failing even to acknowledge Rosberg’s existence in the post-race
formalities, he sulked with all the subtlety of a toddler denied his
favourite sweets.
It was not simply that Rosberg had moved four points clear in the championship
race, but that he felt swindled out of a second Monaco win after prevailing
here in 2008. Instead he had to watch his arch nemesis join a Monegasque
pantheon of men to have won back-to-back grands prix around these twisting
streets.
Indeed, only the exalted group of Sir Stirling Moss, Graham Hill, Niki Lauda,
Prost, Senna, Michael Schumacher and Fernando Alonso had ever done so
before. It was a feat to test Hamilton’s implacable belief in his
superiority within the Silver Arrows, as reflected in a casual aside last
season that “everybody expects me to have the edge on Nico”.
Granted, his notion of normal service could yet be resumed in a fortnight’s
time in Canada, where he has won three times already. But is a sign of how
ruffled he is by Rosberg’s speed and consistency that he is resorting, less
than a third of the way into a 19-race campaign, to psychological warfare.
First, there was the sly dig at his team-mate’s gilded Monaco upbringing,
surrounded by “cars and boats”, then came a rather conspicuous omission when
he was asked to name his ideal top three. “Me, Fernando, Sebastian
[Vettel].”
He did himself little credit, either, with a peculiar remark about recent
Monte Carlo winners. “Certain people have won who you never thought would,
even though you think they’re nowhere near as good as you.” Who could he
possibly have been referring to?
So palpable was the antagonism between the pair at their press conference that
Daniel Ricciardo, celebrating third place with refreshing Aussie languor,
could only look on in amusement. Hamilton’s attempt to justify his barb
about Rosberg’s life of privilege, for instance, was quite strikingly
disingenuous. “I’ve been striving to come and live here,” he said. “I used
to travel around with Nico in his dad’s plane, and that gave me the desire.”
That might well be true – it is the dream of every Formula One star to live in
the principality, when it strips away tax liabilities on £20 million-a-year
earnings – but this was plainly not the sense in which his original comment
was intended. The spoilt little rich kid, he had intimated, could not
possibly have the hunger of the council estate boy from Stevenage.
Right down to their headwear – Rosberg’s a standard-issue black Mercedes cap,
Hamilton’s an outsize turquoise number – these two exhibit every disparity
you could wish for between sworn professional enemies. The fondness that
Hamilton has shown for the Prost-Senna parallels tells you that he is ready
for the fight ahead, even if these have aroused distaste elsewhere.
“The comment that Lewis made about that was a little bit extraordinary, shall
we say,” said former driver Derek Warwick, one of the stewards who decided
Rosberg was innocent of any underhand tactics in qualifying.
Rather than rush to condemn, however, we should relish a dose of the
internecine strife that F1, numbed by four years of unanswerable Vettel
dominance, has been crying for.
The Hamilton-Rosberg saga of 2014 is one we shall remember. Best of all, there
are still 13 more acts to come.