You did not even need to know the Formula One rules to feel that there might be something slightly iffy about Lewis Hamilton’s move on Kimi Raikkonen during the “battle of the Bus Stop”.

In essence, the laws require a driver who has gained an unfair advantage, as Hamilton did by cutting across the inside of the famous chicane when he tried to pass the race leader, Raikkonen, of Ferrari, to give that advantage back before trying anything else.

Hamilton certainly obeyed the letter of the law, but in his haste to attack did he not allow, as one observer put it in a heated paddock afterwards, “adrenalin to triumph over the rulebook?” The British ace allowed Raikkonen to pass him but almost instantaneously went back on the offensive in his McLaren Mercedes and it was debatable whether or not Raikkonen had fully recovered his position and his advantage before Hamilton made his next move.

The rules do not go into detail about how an advantage can be deemed to have been recovered or reestablished and the stewards are thus left to interpret what they see on the television footage, combined with the representations of the drivers and the teams. It is is perhaps this subjective element that leaves an uneasy feeling and it is not hard to sympathise with Hamilton and McLaren, who believed that they had not breached the racing code.

But, equally, anyone who saw the skirmish and the replays will have felt an instinctive moment of alarm at the way Hamilton drove, albeit in the heat of the moment. They might recognise, too, that the stewards had a difficult decision to make, even if allowed the luxury - compared with a football referee - of several hours of deliberations before coming to their conclusion.

McLaren believe that Hamilton did exactly what the rules require. The three stewards - from France, Belgium and Kenya - saw it differently and decided the Briton had gained an advantage.

McLaren insisted in a statement that their telemetry showed that Hamilton had slowed to allow Raikkonen to get past. Hamilton was in no doubt that he had not breached the regulations and he fired a shot at the stewards even before their verdict was announced.

“This is motor racing and if there’s a penalty, then there’s something wrong because I was ahead going into that corner, so I didn’t gain an advantage from it,” he said. “We were still able to race at the next corner and I gave him his spot back. I think it was fair and square, so I think [a penalty] would be absolutely wrong. But you know what they [the stewards] are like, so we will see.”

McLaren’s appeal to the FIA Court of Appeal in Paris is not expected to be heard before the Italian Grand Prix in Monza next weekend, but an FIA official said that he was “not sure if it would be admissable”.