Lewis Hamilton-Nico Rosberg has some of the key ingredients of a great sporting feud but, with the re-emergence of Ferrari and Rosberg already trailing his teammate by 27 points in the drivers' standings, how can we measure it against other legendary battles? The Irreverent View delves into the archives to find out.
They've been friends since childhood, but the simmering rivalry between Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg has been running pretty warm for some time - and used to keep the season revved up in the face of results that are threatening to turn it into a parade lap.
The Mercedes duo have been left to fight it out among themselves for the best part of a year, but after victory for Ferrari's Sebastian Vettel in Malaysia and second place for his stablemate Kimi Raikkonen at Bahrain last weekend, it looks as though they won't be having things all their own way this season. As we ask whether the rivalry is just a playground squabble or filled with such enmity it's worth a place among the list of bitterest sporting feuds, these are the factors that put it in its place:
Best of enemies
Firstly, there's the team-mate factor. Anyone who has ever played or worked in any sort of team knows that the need to come out on top against your supposed colleagues can be even more passionately felt than the desire to beat the outsiders. Formula One, with its pair of drivers who are like siblings (where the parents clearly favour one over the other) showcases this frenemy competition beautifully.
Hamilton and Rosberg's feud really got going at Hungary last year when the team instructed Hamilton to let Rosberg pass. Hamilton replied on the radio: "I'm not slowing down for Nico. If he gets close enough to overtake, he can overtake me." Rosberg was incredulous that he'd not let him; Hamilton couldn't believe he'd been asked to cede ground.
Even so, Rosberg-Hamilton has a long way to go before it reaches the levels of the most bitter teammate-on-teammate rivalry in sporting history: Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding in the 1994 American Olympics team. They were perfectly opposed: Kerrigan tall, elegant, clad in Vera Wang. Harding scrappy, wearing home-made dresses and desperate to escape a life of trailer-park poverty. In a sensationally dumb move, Harding's ex-husband hired a hitman to break Kerrigan's leg at practice in Detroit in January 1994. It was bungled badly, to say the least. Kerrigan had to withdraw from that year's national championships but went on to take silver in the Lillehammer Olympics. Harding finished nowhere and was given three years probation. Her later career lows have included a sex tape and boxing. No matter who comes off worse from Hamilton-Rosberg, it surely won't come to that.
Other side of the tracks
Hamilton, from a humble background in Stevenage, had to battle financial difficulties, not to say the barrier of being the first black man to drive a Formula One car. Rosberg, son of 1982 World Champion Keke, was born into wealth and privilege, everything was set up for him to succeed.
Rosberg has often had to defend himself against the implication that he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He said: "I am very hungry for success and always have been. I've never been happy to live off my dad's fortune or sit back and enjoy the wealth I've been brought up in. I've fought everywhere."
Of course, it suits some to paint two rivals in bold brush strokes like this, accentuate their differences to create a story. Perhaps the most powerful creation in sports marketing history was the Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali fight in 1971.
Ali had been the heavyweight champion until he was stripped of his title for refusing to fight in the Vietnam War - "I ain't got nothing against them Vietcong". Ali was the hero of the young, the liberal, and the black, and Frazier - born on a plantation in South Carolina - found himself cast, expediently and unfairly, in the role of the White America's pet black boxer defending them against the dangerous rebel Ali. Ali poured gasoline on the flames, taunting Frazier as a gorilla and calling him "Uncle Tom". Frazier took a tremendous fight at Madison Square Garden in 1971, winning on unanimous decision - a "white man's decision", as Ali called it. Ali won the rematch, and the Thrilla in Manila fight four years later. Hatred of Ali came to define Frazier's life: the enmity stirred up by Ali led to death threats and police protection. The pair flip-flopped between public apologies and re-ignition of the feud until Frazier's death from liver cancer in 2011. Levels of bitterness of which, fortunately, Formula One's story makers can only dream.
Coming to blows
Things got real at the Belgian Grand Prix last year when the Mercedes pair, looking nailed on for a one-two finish, took a corner of the second lap. Rosberg shunted Hamilton from behind, puncturing his tire and effectively ending his race. "Nico's just hit me, he's just hit me!" yelled Hamilton, sounding in no way like a five-year-old running to his mum.
The claim and counter-claim rumbled on, with Hamilton saying: "He basically said he did it on purpose. He said he could have avoided it, but he didn't want to. He basically said, 'I did it to prove a point'."
An impressively childish situation, no question, but still someway short of sport's most babyish and long-running disputes sparked by disputed physical contact.
For longevity and Alpha Male-ness, you cannot beat the Sir Ian Botham and Ian Chappell feud, which has been running for going on 40 years. The genesis is acknowledged to have been a bar dispute in 1977, when some Pom-bashing chat got out of hand in a Melbourne pub, but the stories converge from there. Chappell says that Botham put a glass to his throat and threatened to "cut him from ear to ear", a claim strenuously denied by Botham, who paints instead a rather more wholesome Wild West version in which he punched Chappell off his bar stool. The hatred was still simmering a mere three decades later when, now long-retired sages of the commentary box, they had to be separated by a Channel 9 colleague at the Ashes Test in Adelaide in 2010.
If Hamilton and Rosberg are still going at it when they're in their sixties, then we can talk.
True greatness
The fourth factor that defines a historic sporting rivalry is true, sustained excellence. Hamilton is a great driver, but is Rosberg? Is their rivalry a Real Madrid v Barcelona? Or is it more of a Chelsea v Tottenham? Until Rosberg can put up some medals against Hamilton, this cannot be claimed to be a contest of equals.
Take, for instance the hatred between Sir Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger that came to define English football from around the turn of the millennium. That was fuelled not just by ego and bitterness, but also the often unspoken acknowledgement that they were streets ahead of their rivals. There was no Sebastian Vettel to come between Sir and Le Prof. They were the managers of indisputably the two best teams in England for a decade, the simmering resentment coming to a head in the 2004 Pizzagate match. Ferguson: "Wenger is a disgrace." Wenger: "He has lost all sense of reality." It was a rivalry that spurred both of them onto greater heights.
Rosberg-Hamilton is tasty, no doubt about it. And it is exactly what Formula One needs, in a year when the two of them are driving cars that are streets ahead of everyone else's. But in terms of longevity, viciousness, bitterness and being two hated rivals locked in combat on a plane of greatness above all the others? These two drivers have a few laps to go yet.