As if there were any doubts left, it was now clear that these tangles were more than just a coincidence, and Massa made sure the world knew in the media pen post-race.
Grabbing his rival by the arm and interrupting an interview, he told Hamilton “Good job,” with the champion turning and fighting back with a, “Don’t touch me, man.”
Talking to the BBC ahead of the next race in Japan, Massa explained: “I tried to speak to him without the media but he didn’t even turn his head when he passed through, I called him twice.
“Then when I saw him there I had to say something. For sure I was disappointed, maybe what I did wasn’t the right thing, but what he did was ten times worse.
Actually, I think he has a problem with me, because I never did anything to him. Everything he did he’s paying for it, not just with me but with other drivers as well. He doesn’t have two problems in this championship, he has many.”
To add even more fuel to the fire, it emerged that during the Singapore Grand Prix, Massa’s race engineer Rob Smedley had told him over the radio to ‘destroy his [Hamilton’s] race’.
Responding to the story, Massa said: “For sure, ‘destroy his race’ doesn’t mean what the words say because we are in competition and the time he said that was a completely different time.
“We’re racing and it’s competition and Rob says so many things to me during the race. The radio is closed but if the radio was open you guys would laugh the whole race, the words Rob said were something to push me, to stay ahead. For sure if my engineer told me to destroy the race of another driver I would not do it.”