The friction between Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso will take some sorting out and will only increase in intensity over the final six grands prix. McLaren were having a dream year, with the most desirable drivers on the grid, the most reliable and often the fastest car, and sponsors and technical partners revelling in the season and Hamilton-mania in particular. Now they are fighting what will surely become irreconcilable differences between their two championship contenders while simultaneously fending off the governing body, the FIA, and seemingly other teams ready to stick the boot in.

All teams, none more so than McLaren, consider their drivers as simply the highest-paid employees. But they are employees all the same, who must do as they are instructed. All Formula One driver contracts provide for a driver to have to follow the team’s principles and the team manager’s instructions, within the regulations, at all times. As teams have tied down young drivers earlier and earlier, the contractual terms more and more favour the teams to a point where they are often not even obliged to enter the driver in a grand prix. A driver is seen as the final link in the chain, no more, but then he is also fighting for his career and glory on race day.

I have said a number of times in these pages that the point where Hamilton moves from grateful protege to fully fledged championship contender making demands on the team will be a painful one. It has been even worse than I thought. I am impressed that he has the confidence and front, in his rookie season, to go head to head with Alonso and Ron Dennis, his boss at McLaren. And anyone else who steps in the way of “his” championship. He cleared his head and took a magnificent victory in Hungary last Sunday.

I know 10 other former McLaren drivers very well, and it’s fair to say that they have great admiration for Dennis, along with some negative baggage. He’s a tough team boss to handle, to say the least. Only the late Ayrton Senna mastered him. But he did it cleverly, eye to eye, behind closed doors, or maybe with gentle and timely hints in the press. He would not have broadcast that radio call to the team that Hamilton did, and subsequently the world, during qualifying in Hungary.

Alonso is another tough cookie. He has a Spanish entourage around him within the McLaren team and they operate as a unit. We know from his comments when he was penalised on the grid in Monza last year that he is an emotional animal who says what he thinks. He may well have been lured away from Renault on apparently certain advice from McLaren that Renault were leaving F1. He expected No 1 status this year, not a championship challenge from a rookie driver within the team. He wants the team to nail down Hamilton – and, reading between the lines, I suspect the team would prefer Alonso to win.

Meanwhile, Hamilton fancies his first championship and is fighting his corner ferociously, just as he does every corner on the track. He will not yield, and who can blame him?

Hamilton also wants more money because he feels he is not being paid in line with the job he is doing. The team will feel it took the gamble, paid for his racing career to date and moulded him and is entitled to some payback.

McLaren’s only possible response is to remind the drivers of their contractual position, try to mediate diplomatically, then stick rigidly to parity for the two drivers. This will probably force the drivers to take their own actions; I suspect contact on the track is not far away.

We have seen similar confrontations before – Gilles Ville-neuve and Didier Pironi at Ferrari, Nigel Mansell and Nelson Piquet at Williams, Alain Prost and Senna at McLaren. They all mistrusted each other, but, crucially, this current battle of competitive wills and vitriol is aimed at the team too. McLaren have to make sure that the engineers and mechanics on either side of the garage stay competitive but neutral and ride out the storm until a winner emerges.

In a Sunday Times interview in June, Dennis told me that he didn’t allow himself the luxury of emotions, but the multifaceted attack on his team and his integrity after Hungary has burst straight through that defence. As his team was banned from the podium in Budapest, his points were taken away and his drivers were beating up on him for giving both of them a champion-ship-winning car, I thought his restraint was remarkable. He somehow has to referee these two superstars, otherwise Ferrari will sneak in under the wire. The concept of McLaren releasing one of the drivers from his contract early is denied.

Then there is the continuing spy story involving Ferrari, which is the subject of an appeal by the Italian team and its sporting authority and will be heard by the FIA appeal court on September 13, by which time there will be only four GPs remaining.

The initial hearing delivered a unanimous decision that a key McLaren employee had had sight of documents thought to be relevant to the 2007 Ferrari, but because no trace of that information has been found on the McLaren car or in the factory, McLaren were not punished. Ferrari are demanding to be able to ask their own questions. Other teams, notably Renault, want to be at the appeal too. Those teams say a dangerous precedent has been set, and the decision means that future industrial espionage within the sport will go unpunished.

Flavio Briatore, the Renault team boss, fancies the extra significant cash his team will receive if McLaren are dumped from the championship. He also wants to pay McLaren back for stealing Alonso and rudely announcing it a year early while the Spaniard was in the middle of his two Renault championships. Briatore sees a chance to grab Alonso back if he leaves McLaren and feels that it was McLaren who made the official complaint about the Renault “mass damper” device that so nearly derailed his championship victories last year. No love lost there.

The core problem is that Ferrari have hacked off one or more of their key employees who have, incredibly, been able to pass on significant information to at least one other team. The disgruntled personnel have also contacted at least two more teams about future employment. Now Ferrari want others punished instead of minding their own store.

I have no issue with Ferrari.

I applaud their magnificent history and success in recent years with Michael Schumacher, and I have owned with great pleasure and pride several of their road cars. But if they win this championship in an FIA court, it will be a hollow victory indeed.