I've been involved in F1 for a long time now and been a fan for even longer, not since the days of Prost and Senna has there been a more bitterly contested rivalry within a team than at McLaren in 2007.
I'd taken up a new, more central role that year, overseeing the build of both race cars and therefore formed part of that third team of people within the organisation I spoke of earlier. Both Lewis and Fernando were new to the team and I had no particular allegiance to either as the season began. Both drivers got on well together, Fernando confident of his unspoken number one position and Lewis, at that stage, in awe of his team-mate and keen to learn from him.
By the time we reached Monaco, Lewis' confidence had boomed, perhaps a little too much it could be said for someone with an F1 career consisting of four races. Fernando, I'm sure, was finding it a little 'frustrating' that the new boy wouldn't just stay behind him and when it came to that race and both cars were fast and out in front, radio traffic became a little heated from both drivers. Lewis was told to hold his second position to avoid risking a crash around the tight and unforgiving streets of Monte Carlo, but proceeded to push Fernando all the way, attempting numerous bold moves. Both were shouting and screaming over the radio and it became the beginning of the end of the partnership, but significantly the beginning of a huge split down the middle of the McLaren garage.
The drivers are hugely influential forces in any F1 setup, it's a responsibility that comes with the job. If the driver pairing works, together they can galvanise a team, boost moral and help drive everyone on, what happened in 2007 at McLaren was quite the opposite.
As the drivers began to publicly fall out, and particularly after the well documented Hungary qualifying incident, there was no secret that the two didn't like each other and the last thing they would be prepared to do would be to work together.
The unavoidable tension didn't take long to spread throughout the team. Fernando tried desperately to rally his own side of the garage with 'perks' for people associated with his car and Lewis played his best media games, notably a display of shaking hands with the entire team whenever the TV cameras came in pre-race.
The car crews, as ever got behind their men, but interestingly developed a quite intense distain for the driver on the other side of the invisible divide. A rivalry like I hadn't really seen before emerged between mechanics and engineers on either side and even they began to distance themselves from each other more and more.
With all this going on each week, coupled with our exclusion from the constructors' championship as part of the Spygate affair, McLaren was not a nice place to be working that year. As someone with no affiliation to either driver, I lost a lot of respect for both during the course of the season.
They were both incredibly fast and we had a very fast car. It was a year when our team should have cleaned up and yet the shameful truth is that when we got to Brazil, with both of them in contention for the WDC, but no WCC points to play for, in my heart I hoped Kimi would come away victorious.
Of course I still did the best job I could over the weekend and in pitstops etc, but to have those feelings shocked me and was a dramatic example of the influence of two bickering drivers within the same team over everyone else within it.
F1's a team sport and whilst healthy competition on the inside is great, it needs everyone within pulling in the same direction to be successful. One portion of the team is always likely to end up happier than the other, but at the end of the day, if the figureheads, the public faces of that team, are pulling each other apart, they pull the whole lot down with them very quickly.
