The race for the Formula One drivers’ title is fast evolving into a fantastic story. The rookie Briton racing for a British team against the Spanish world champion contracted to that same team. The technical talk of the constructors’ title has been swept aside as far as the public is concerned. We sit engrossed by a motorised duel the bitter like of which we have not seen since 1989, when Alain Prost, the champion, found himself in danger of being overwhelmed by the youthful ferocity and genius of Ayrton Senna.

Then, as now, both men were driving for McLaren. Then, as now, Ron Dennis was the McLaren team principal. Is this history repeating itself? Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton have yet to scale the heights of those celebrated rivals, but the intensity of their ambition, Hamilton’s in particular, must have Dennis’s mind drifting backwards in time.

Comparing Hamilton with Senna is premature, but the comparison with one of racing’s bitter rivalries is not. Reading the British press last week, it was easy to avoid the fact that it was the young pretender who initially broke ranks from McLaren’s strictures. Hamilton ignored the team orders of Dennis to allow Alonso to pass him at the start of the final qualifying session for last weekend’s Hungarian Grand Prix. Alonso’s piqued response was to deliberately delay the youthful pretender during the final pit stop, thereby costing Hamilton a shot at the fastest qualifying lap and with it pole position. This is how I remember Prost versus Senna.

The one big difference is that in the late 1980s Prost was an absolutely committed team player in a way that neither of the contemporary pair could probably comprehend. Alonso arrived at McLaren as a world champion and expected to be treated accordingly; Hamilton just wants to be the best, a driven man for whom no amount of financial support and inspired faith invested over the years by Dennis was going to stop him, f-word or not, from speaking his mind when he received instructions contrary to his colossal and immediate ambitions.

In retirement, neither man is likely to reiterate these Prostian words, uttered by the Frenchman in retirement in 1998: “If I was going back to the start of my racing career now, I would concentrate on me and my job.” Instead of doing that, Prost selflessly recommended that Dennis sign Senna, a decision that would have enormous implications for the future of himself and the sport.

What we are hearing from today’s men is that the team is favouring the other driver. In the case of Alonso, there are yet more eerie echoes of a bygone age. His complaint, especially to the Spanish press, is that the British team has a natural bias towards the young Briton. Here is Prost again: “My biggest problem was that I never had the relationship with them that Ayrton did. From the beginning it was something I never felt I had under control.”

The “them” to which he refers were Honda, suppliers of the McLaren engines; Senna had worked with them the previous year and Prost believed that the Japanese offered unfair priority treatment for the rising star. The relationship fragmented then as it has now and duly irritated McLaren.

In their first season together at McLaren, Senna was crowned world champion. Prost was pleased for the team. “We were first and second in the championship and I was not too upset that he won the title. I’d won it twice already by then, it wasn’t a problem.”

Alonso, we assume, will not be delighted to finish runner-up to Hamilton. The feud has already cost McLaren constructers’ points and it will undoubtedly cause more strain as the championship races towards a potentially dramatic denouement. The Spanish media think the whole thing another example of perfidious Albion, with wild claims of sabotage and criticisms of Hamilton abundant. It has become personal, but the problems of Dennis are sweet delights for the rest of us.

F1 needed to have the science of the sport stripped back to reveal the flawed face of humanity. In their own style the champion and the pretender have increased the dramatic tempo of a sport in which, for all the glamour of Monte Carlo, the sheer difficulty of overtaking lends a monotonous quality.

All sport thrives on rivalry that teeters on the brink of animosity. Ali and Frazier, McEnroe and Connors, Coe and Ovett; these are the antagonisms that lift a sport from its specialised support base to the wider public that, America aside, is pretty much the unchallenged domain of football.

Yet motor racing’s luminaries, men such as Nigel Mansell, criticise McLaren for allowing the row to become public. “It’s something for the team to deal with. It’s not something for the public to be part of,” tutted the former world champion, sounding remarkably like a politician fortunate enough to belong to the party residing in power.

Prost might beg to differ. From the heights of retirement he has long understood how the antagonism of two men fuelled the sport. “The pressure was so high, so high . . . if we had to do it all again, I’d say to Ayrton, ‘Listen, we’re the best, we can screw the others’. Still, even as it turned out, it was a fantastic story, don’t you think? And in a way we’re missing a little of that today.”

The Frenchman’s thoughts date back to an interview in 1998, a decade after the fires of his rivalry with Senna ignited. Nearly one decade on, Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton are filling a void that has existed for nearly 20 years. Technology is cast as the sub-plot, with men again the main story. Despite the tabloid exaggerations, there is no doubt we are being treated to a fantastic story with a few more explosive chapters yet to come.

Bonds discovers that mud sticks

The Tour de France is over, but the drug headlines refuse to go away. It has been a week in which our fix of drug-cheat stories has been well and truly supplied.

First to athletics and Christine Ohuruogu. The 23-year-old Commonwealth champion at 400m has been named in the British team to compete in the world championships just 24 hours after completing her one-year doping suspension. “Doping suspension” is how her ban has been almost universally described. However, she was not banned for any positive tests, but for the sin of omission. Three times she missed tests – or, should I write, “evaded” them, in the spirit of our age.

The athlete has a responsibility to comply with drug-testing agencies, nobody doubts that, but the topic seems to have taken on a fanatical obsession. Drugs are Captain Ahab’s white whale; all our fixations and obsessions with the failings of our highly commercialised sporting age appear heaped upon the one subject.

So it is in the United States, where, with the cold war long over, the obsession with drugs has switched from the performance-enhancing but body-destroying eastern bloc to its own backyard.

Last week the baseball player Barry Bonds hit his 756th home run to eclipse the record set by Hank Aaron in a playing career that ran from 1954 until 1976. The American Dream is probably more inextricably linked to the blue-collar sport of baseball than any other, yet on this most historic night the nation’s baseball commissioner, Bud Selig, was not there to witness the feat. The presumption about his absence is that it was squarely down to an investigation into Bonds’s alleged use of steroids.

To the neutral observer, it may seem that Bonds’s achievement should have been a moment for celebration. However, the truth is that nobody, other than his fanatical San Francisco Giants following, wants to be too closely associated with a man who has slugged his way above and beyond Babe Ruth as a hitter.

Like Ohuruogu, Bonds has denied any wrongdoing, but our tenacity to hunt down drug cheats sweeps all aside and leaves him and many others judged before a jury has even been considered.

This is no defence for drug cheating, but as Herman Melville wrote, “All that most maddens and torments . . . all truth with malice in it . . . all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick.”

Drugs are not the only problem.

Loyalty has its price

Chelsea Football Club are fortunate to be blessed with such selfless servants in their ranks as Frank Lampard. In an attempt to maintain his focus for this critical season for the club, he has called a halt to contract negotiations for the good of the team.

Hand on heart, he has come clean and said: “I have told the club that I don’t want to be involved in negotiations that are not going to end well”.

Lampard confessed that it was on his mind for much of last season, when he was constantly linked with a move to Barcelona, that it didn’t help him and that he didn’t enjoy it. He wants to sort the problems out off-season and wants to stay blue for the rest of his career. He loves the club. It’s more than the money, it is a last contract, and these football players have a brief shelf life, you know. So, while you and I might think that a two-year deal offering more than £100,000 a week is acceptable, we have the rest of our working lives to accumulate it, unlike Lampard and friends.

So please don’t doubt his publicised love for the club, it’s just that these days love has a price.