In a ferocious wheel-to-wheel battle in the Malaysian GP, World Champion Sebastian Vettel defied Red Bull team orders instructing him to hold position behind Mark Webber to overtake his team-mate to claim his first victory of 2013.
The intra-team Red Bull and Mercedes fireworks came at the end of what had already been a massively entertaining, and incident-packed, 56 laps around an initially drying Sepang as Fernando Alonso crashed out after astonishingly failing to pit for repairs to a broken front wing while Hamilton forgot which team he was driving for and pulled into McLaren's pitbox.
From there, and once onto slicks, the battle for victory initially distilled into what Sky Sports F1 commentator David Croft described as a "high-speed game of chess" between the Red Bull and Mercedes drivers. However, the chess pieces were sent flying in both dramatic - and highly contentious - fashion over the closing stint as the four-way battle broke up into separate intra-team ones between Red Bull's Webber and Vettel for the win and Mercedes' Hamilton and Rosberg over third.
Webber, having assumed the lead through the first round of stops to dry tyres following a rare strong start from fifth, had led until the final stops but was then overtaken by his World Champion team-mate as the pair went wheel-to-wheel for over a lap.
That, however, was not in Red Bull's plan. Speaking to Sky Sports F1 after his drivers had experienced the most frosty of podium ceremonies, Christian Horner confirmed the drivers had been told to hold station with Webber in the lead.
"We let the drivers race until the final pit-stop. At that point, the drivers' interest became bigger than the team's and they started racing each other," Horner said.
Vettel, for his, part apologised to his long-time team-mate in the post-race press conference but the rivalry between them - which first spilled over as long ago as Turkey 2010 - may not recover from this latest incident.
Mercedes, simultaneously, had their own disgruntled drivers on their hands after Rosberg was told to hold station between new team-mate Hamilton over the closing laps, as the Briton focused on saving fuel after setting a ferocious pace in the middle stint.
