The circumstances of the latest Red Bull internal flare-up are now known to just about everyone. This was not just a matter of Horner and Adrian Newey only having one of the new specification front wings at Silverstone and deciding who to give it to. Instead, it was the double-whammy of Vettel having had a failure on his part but not being made to cop it sweet, and then having the new wing actually removed from Webber’s car and put on Vettel’s. To top it all off, Horner clumsily tried to justify the decision.

He said that he was under no pressure in his decision from Dietrich Mateschitz and his henchman Dr Helmut Marko, which of course is where the Vettel-love primarily resides. I’m inclined to believe him. At most, he was influenced by the convenient fact that Sebastian, the golden boy, was ahead of Webber again post-Valencia. More likely, Horner’s decision was due to the sheer naivety of incorrectly using the logic that would apply if only one new wing was available to begin with.

This was an altogether different situation and that logic did not apply. Or at least it should not have applied without realising that it would stoke the fire which had already been smouldering since Turkey and result in yet another PR faux pas and more unnecessary headaches. His radio chit-chat with Webber on the warm-down lap was unenthusiastic, definitely, but it also sounded tired and somewhat embarrassed as if Horner knew he had conceded the moral high ground.

On the track itself on Sunday, to say that Webber was on a mission would be an understatement. It was simply an imperious drive. He made a terrific start, gave no quarter to Vettel on the run to Copse, and redeemed himself for both Valencia and Sepang in one hit. The only question mark over his day were his post-race quips - sarcastically describing himself as the number two driver, and saying that he would not have re-signed for Red Bull if he knew he would be treated this way.

On one hand, this was brutal, politically-incorrect honesty, and a major blow in the PR battle amongst the fans. It’s working, too. Vettel was undoubtedly culpable in Turkey but, as Jonathan Noble writes in a very balanced article on autosport.com, Sebastian did nothing wrong at Silverstone except for not turning down the new wing, but which self-respecting contender would? Increasingly, though, he’s being cast as a villain. And for someone who already makes a fair few errors, he doesn’t need that kind of pressure.

But Mark also has to tread carefully. In the days since he says he’s cleared the air with the team and its management, but ultimately he needs the team on-side for the last nine races of the season, especially when he is still behind both McLaren drivers. The “number two driver” line was a nice one-off jibe, but querying why he re-signed went too far. He’s on year-by-year contracts and he’s not indispensable. Why make Red Bull start questioning why they’re also re-signing him?

Having got caught in no-man’s land at the first corner and suffering a puncture courtesy of Lewis Hamilton, Vettel was in dreamland for much of the race and at risk of getting lapped by, but the safety car intervention gave him new energy. For once he made some passing moves, scything past the Toro Rossos, Felipe Massa, Vitaly Petrov, Nico Hulkenberg and Michael Schumacher, although he did seem somewhat bereft of ideas once he got stuck behind Adrian Sutil other than being super-aggressive.

The Red Bull fun and games took the shine off a brilliant weekend for Hamilton. The latest McLaren go-faster bits weren’t quite working, and the car was struggling over the bump at the new Abbey right-hander, but he dragged it to 4th on the grid and called it his best qualifying lap ever. Then after a start as good as Webber’s, he gave the Aussie no peace, and deservedly remains the points leader. Whilst the fact that the MP4-25 isn’t consistently world-beating gives Red Bull hope, Hamilton’s own form is daunting.

Come race day, Jenson Button just keeps hanging in there. His season is starting to look a lot like 2009, starting with a flurry, and then getting bogged down in weekends where miserable qualifying efforts are made up for by fighting race showings that keep the points stacking up. His start from 14th to 8th on the first lap was crucial, so too his renowned tyre management which meant that he could stay on the softer tyres longer and leap up to 5th, which became 4th after Fernando Alonso’s penalty.

By contrast, Ferrari keeps finding ways not to maximise their potential, whether through driving or operational errors, unreliability, or being on the wrong side of officialdom. How different that is from the relentless Ferrari juggernaut of the early 2000s. At Silverstone the F10 was competitive, but Alonso’s poor start had him dicing with team-mate Massa on the first lap, causing their collision and Felipe’s puncture from which he never recovered. That’s three non-scoring races in a row for the off-the-boil Brazilian.

Alonso’s race - and perhaps his title hopes - was scuppered of course by the penalty that resulted from passing Robert Kubica on the grass. Of course, on its face a drive-through for not ceding the place back to the Renault, especially after the Pole had retired, was awfully harsh. The fact that the penalty could not be served until after the safety car had bunched up the whole field made it even more so. No sympathy though if Ferrari had ignored race control’s directives to give the place back.

Then again, why would Ferrari deliberately disobey? Because they thought they had a case to argue? There is indeed a driving ethics question here to which there is no easy answer. Alonso was fully alongside Kubica on the outside of Vale. Robert took his natural line into Club which inevitably forced Fernando onto the grass - he had nowhere else to go. On one hand, you could say that that was forceful defending by someone entitled to take his line. But is that to be praised when it involves pushing someone off the track?

If Alonso was alongside Kubica on a straight and the Pole shoved him onto the grass, we would all be slamming that as dirty driving. It is arguable that the only difference here is that the geometry of the track gave Robert a justification for forcing Fernando off the road. To what extent does a driver have to be ahead (if at all) in order to claim a corner, take whatever line he chooses, and let his opponent deal with the consequences if he hangs around the outside? When ought he be obliged to give his rival racing room?

The quiet achiever of the weekend was Nico Rosberg, as Mercedes rebounded from two horror weekends to record a double-points finish. Nico was solid enough, starting 5th, moving up a place on the first lap, and getting past Kubica into 3rd early, where he basically stayed to the end, although differing strategies meant he had to pull off an excellent move on Jaime Alguersuari. He has now scored in every race bar one, and is only one of four drivers (along with Hamilton, Button and Webber) to have done that.

But while Rosberg has been consistent, his team and illustrious team-mate have been anything but. What did this round mean - that Mercedes are on the improve again? That they understood what had gone so wrong in Valencia? Or does the outfit, despite Ross Brawn’s know-how, not actually understand this car? Meanwhile, Schumacher says he is looking to 2011 already - face-saving words after another yo-yo weekend which raised more questions than answers about the former champion’s form.

Not for the first time this season, Schumacher looked like finally getting it together during practice, only to get trounced by Rosberg when it counts. And for a man renowned for having the killer instinct to pull off what was required when it was required, how does one explain why Schumi was almost eliminated in Q1, then found over a second to go faster than Rosberg in Q2, only to lose several tenths in Q3 and be slowest of all in that segment, even behind Pedro de la Rosa’s Sauber?

Then in the race, Michael jumps up to 10th on the first lap, but again not for the first time this season, he is the first to stop and be the guinea pig in relation to tyres. Also not for the first time, the move doesn’t pay off and in fact Schumi loses positions, because fresh primes are still no match for used-but-useful options. And late in the race, not for the first time, he’s stuck in the midfield mire. But since when has Michael been a carefree, helpless experimentalist? Something is not right about all this.

Whereas no-one knows what direction Mercedes is heading in, Williams scored good points for the second race in succession, Rubens Barrichello backing up his 4th place at Valencia with 5th at Silverstone, and Hulkenberg coming home 10th after a long first stint on the softer tyres. Even if, as we suggested last time, this is partly a function of the ebb and flow of development cycles, there is also no doubt that Williams have steadily understood and discovered something. Mercedes ought to take note.

But once again, one of the heroes of the race was surely Kamui Kobayashi in the Sauber, as the Japanese driver equalled his 6th place finish in Abu Dhabi last year. Unlike in Valencia, this was not the product of any unorthodox strategy, this was due to genuine competitive race pace. Not only did he leapfrog Schumacher during the pit stops, but he hounded Barrichello mercilessly in the final stint after the safety car. Yet Rubens has probably done more laps around Silverstone than Kobayashi has in an F1 car!

It was, however, more disappointment for de la Rosa, whose best starting position of the year meant nothing after an average start and eventually a clash with Sutil down the front straight after he viciously chopped the German, which saw his rear wing progressively disintegrate and causing the safety car intervention. The remarkable thing was that the Spaniard came into the pits, but rather than assess the damage his crew simply bolted on a new set of tyres and sent him back out to spread more debris!

Not surprisingly, Ferrari/Alonso and Red Bull/Horner dominated the nominations for 'Reject of the Race' on the F1 Rejects forum. But the criteria for ROTR has never been who made the biggest or most costly error, or who shot themselves in the foot the most. ROTR often requires some degree of headshake-inducing hilarity, idiocy or underperformance. Sending a car back out with a rear wing falling to bits falls into that category, and so the BMW Sauber pit crew earn the award this time around.

Force India remain not quite on the pace on Saturday, but they - read “Sutil” - keep scoring points on Sunday. The German driver has amassed seven points-scoring finishes, including six in a row, and is only a point behind Schumacher. This was one of Adrian’s finest drives as well, brilliantly passing Schumi just after the safety car restart, and then calmly fending off the marauding Vettel for lap after lap, not missing apexes but putting the power down cleanly. It was mature stuff from a driver who is truly coming of age.

Sutil’s newfound consistency also has the effect of really illuminating Vitantonio Liuzzi’s frustrating inconsistency. Tonio will have his weekends when he qualifies in the top ten and scores points, and others where he is utterly anonymous. Silverstone, like Valencia, fell into the latter category, although he was not helped by a gearbox change. But it took him inordinately long to pass a Virgin and the Lotuses on the track and you just knew he was not going to make that much progress up the field.

It was not a great weekend for Toro Rosso either after some recent points-scoring efforts. Stuck in the lower midfield, they needed to do something different to move up. They didn’t do that with Sebastien Buemi. With Alguersuari, they ran the primes first for a long stint, which allowed him to get past his team-mate and he may have challenged Hulkenberg for the last points-paying position but for his brake failure which pitched him off at Luffield, bringing his perfect finishing record to an end.

Kubica’s halfshaft failure also meant his first retirement of the year and his first non-scoring race since Bahrain, but although he qualified 6th his race pace had been average. Although he jumped up to 3rd, he was clearly holding up Rosberg, then Alonso before he retired. But such has been the high level of performance that Renault and Kubica have shown this year, a blip had to come sooner or later. On the whole, and seeing how the team has progressed recently, Robert has done the right thing in re-signing with them.

Petrov may not be racking up the points as Kubica has been doing, but he continues to be doing a credible job. He was faster than his team-mate in Q1, and would have had a better chance of going through Q2 had his engine not cut out on pit entry after his first run. Then a puncture late in the race destroyed any chance of a points finish. If the Russian had had more weekends this season when everything has gone smoothly, he would have easily scored more than the 6 points he has on the board.

Lotus was again the best of the new teams, although after recent promise of getting closer to the midfield, Heikki Kovalainen was two seconds slower than Alguersuari in front of him. Jarno Trulli suffered problems throughout free practice which explained why he was slower than both Kovalainen and Timo Glock’s Virgin in qualifying, but he got past them both at the start and held off his team-mate to the finish, as the team starts turning its attentions to their 2011 challenger.

Glock will be encouraged that he came within a few tenths of Kovalainen in qualifying and could battle with the Lotuses all race. If Virgin keep refining their VR01 whilst Lotus stops development on the T127, then the battle amongst the new teams could get interesting in the second half of the season. That is, so long as they get to the finish. Reliability issues struck Virgin again at Silverstone with Lucas di Grassi retiring early with yet more hydraulics problems.

The problem down at Hispania, however, is not reliability but ... what exactly? On the eve of the race there was the extraordinary situation of Colin Kolles deciding to bench Bruno Senna and give Sakon Yamamoto the race seat for the weekend. Kolles kept dodging the questions about why the change had been made, but suggested that Senna would be back in the car in future rounds. Whilst money issues was the prime suspect, rumours are that the real reason may in fact have been disciplinary.

Karun Chandhok revelled in his role as de facto team leader this weekend, although he was still some way off the pace in qualifying and would have missed a 107% cut. Still, he was miles ahead of Yamamoto, who had little time to acclimatise and was starting from a questionable level of ability anyway. There is simply no way that he deserves a place in F1 on merit. Still, both cars made it to the finish, although the Indian easily had the measure of his team-mate all race.