Vettel & Alonso disagree over Hamilton

Reading the headline, who would you tend to immediately think is the one siding with McLaren's Lewis Hamilton?

Would it be Red Bull's Sebastian Vettel or Ferrari's Fernando Alonso?

One is the reigning F1 World Champion who has had very few incidents with Hamilton over the years and the other has been his former team-mate and bitter rival since the Brit entered Formula One in 2007.

The rivalry between Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso is well documented. Both fierce-some competitors at pinnacle of their sport are always likely to rub each other up the wrong way.

But despite their problematic first year together they would appear, on the outside looking in anyway, to have patched up their differences.

Fernando Alonso may well have vetoed any possible thoughts that Hamilton may have had in regards to thinking about a future move to Ferrari, but the two drivers appear to have a much better relationship and even when the McLaren of Lewis Hamilton was racing with the race leader Fernando Alonso, not for position, but to try and un-lap himself, Alonso refused to be critical of what the Brit was doing.

After suffering a poor start to the race and a puncture, picked up from various front wing damage other drivers had suffered at the start of the race, Hamilton found himself a lap down and in front of Jenson Button.

Hamilton was told to not hold his team-mate up, so he started to run fast lap times, his pace was quite notably faster than the race leaders, so when he quickly caught up to the back of Vettel he over took him.

Red Bull may have feared that Hamilton would then impeded Vettel, allowing Button to close the gap, but instead Hamilton actually pulled away from Vettel and began to catch the Ferrari of Alonso.

'I knew that if Lewis was close enough with the DRS and trying to overtake, I had no problem to leave the space, I knew he was not in the race. We didn't want to risk anything. For me it was a good position to have Hamilton between me and Sebastian. Alonso told Autosport Magazine.

'Having Hamilton there it meant Sebastian was 2.5s behind approaching the pitstop, so I tried to keep Lewis there.'

Skip down to the Red Bull garage and Red Bull and Sebastian Vettel held a completely different view.

Despite the fact that what Lewis Hamilton did was perfectly legal, Red Bull and Vettel slammed the actions of the McLaren driver.

'That was not nice of Lewis. I don't see why he was racing us, If he wants to go fast he should drop back and find a gap. It was stupid as he was a lap down.' Vettel said.

He continued: 'If you want to go quick and you have no chance to win the race you should respect that and use common sense. I didn't expect him to attack because I didn't see the point, and then I was surprised when he was side by side.'

Red Bull team boss Christian Horner thought the incident conveniently helped Hamilton's team-mate Jenson Button, but did concede that what Hamilton did was perfectly legal.

"If you look at the rules, I don't think there is anything to say a car can't unlap itself.

"What was frustrating for us is that it cost us a second and unfortunately he didn't unlap himself from Fernando as well. he told the BBC before adding: "of course that's frustrating if it doesn't affect two leaders identically but within the rules he did nothing wrong. Arguably he helped his team-mate."