It was the weekend when the gloves well and truly came off.

Nico Rosberg beat his Mercedes team-mate Lewis Hamilton to win the Monaco Grand Prix for the second year in a row on Sunday, but what really mattered was what had happened in qualifying the previous day.

Rosberg had run wide on his final lap on Saturday afternoon. Behind on the track, Hamilton had to back off for the caution flags waved for Rosberg's incident and his hopes of beating the German's time were gone.

Pole was secured - by fair means or foul, and Hamilton felt it was foul - and Monaco being what it is, Hamilton knew that his hopes of victory were effectively gone, too, barring a poor start by Rosberg. That didn't happen and sure enough, 78 incident-filled laps later, Hamilton followed Rosberg home.

You could cut the atmosphere with a knife in the post-race news conference.

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Monaco GP: Lewis Hamilton's team radio frustration

Rosberg did his best to answer questions about his victory without exacerbating the situation, and Hamilton did his best to say nothing at all.

Even so, more interesting details about their increasingly fractious relationship came to light.

Hamilton was confronted with the knowledge, which emerged at the weekend, that on his way to victory in Spain two weeks before he had switched to an engine 'boost' mode the drivers had been forbidden from using.

He responded by saying that it did not affect the outcome of the race, and that anyway Rosberg had already done the same thing in the course of their titanic battle for victory in Bahrain last month.