Verstappen started all this, in public at least, after winning last weekend's Qatar Grand Prix. He said he had "lost all respect" for Russell, adding: "I've never seen someone trying to screw someone over that hard."

The Dutchman's comments were a reference to his perception of Russell's actions in the stewards' room in Qatar, at a hearing that led to the Red Bull driver being given a one-place grid penalty and being demoted from pole position to second place behind Russell's Mercedes.

Verstappen had been called to the stewards for driving unnecessarily slowly, and Russell, as the driver who had been impeded, went, too.

They had qualified one-two for the grand prix, with Verstappen ahead of Russell.

Verstappen had broken the rule defining the speed drivers are not allowed to dip below on a slow lap in qualifying. But what happened in the stewards' room incensed Verstappen, who felt Russell had gone overboard in stating his case in a bid to earn his rival a penalty.

Russell, who had been fastest on the first runs in final qualifying, felt the incident had cost him pole position.

They exchanged words outside the stewards' room after the hearing, when Russell claims Verstappen threatened to "purposefully go out of his way to crash into me and 'put me on my head in the wall'". Again the drivers were being interviewed on the grid before the race. Their second argument was witnessed by Sainz, Norris and Verstappen's team-mate Sergio Perez.

Because of the timings of the post-race interviews in Qatar, Thursday - media day at the season finale in Abu Dhabi - was Russell's first chance to address Verstappen's comments.

"It's funny," he said, "because even before I said a word in the stewards, he was swearing at the stewards. He was so angry before I'd even spoken.

"There is nothing to lie about. He was going too slow. He was on the racing line and in the high-speed corner. I wasn't trying to get him a penalty. I was just trying to prepare my lap.

"You fight hard on the track and in the stewards, the same way as Max the very next day asked his team to look at Lando's penalty on the yellow flag. That's not personal. That's racing. I don't know why he felt the need for this personal attack and I'm not going to take it."

It's not as if Russell and Verstappen have always despised each other, though their relationship clearly needs some maintenance.

Of course, drivers are friendlier with some of their peers than others.

Verstappen gets on particularly well with Nico Hulkenberg. Norris is good friends with Sainz, whose relationship with Charles Leclerc seems particularly warm for team-mates. Hamilton generally keeps himself to himself.

And this has been an era of remarkable harmony between the drivers. But once they get out on track, where it matters to these animals of incredible competitive intensity, all that is forgotten.

For the other drivers, this is wryly amusing, and all part of the game.

Norris - Verstappen's title rival this year and a friend of both men - said: "For George, by saying what he said… at times you have that respect between drivers when something happens and you don't want either to get a penalty because it's just a situation where no-one should really get a penalty.

"Mercedes are not fighting for a championship so they will do what - at all costs - it takes to try and get a pole or win, and maybe he has paid the price a little bit in the respect from Max.

"But everyone does things their own way. I enjoyed watching them argue the way they did."

Fernando Alonso, whose mutual respect with Verstappen has been obvious for years, dismissed the Dutchman's claim Russell was two-faced.

"No, I don't think so," Alonso said. "George is a great driver, great person. I'm a good friend of George as well. I don't think that he's showing different faces here and there.

"I think it's more about what Max probably agrees with me that I said many times, that some of the penalties are a little bit not consistent.

"You know, if you have that one episode in Qatar and then you go to the next event and you replicate exactly the same episode - which you can replicate by yourself, you can induce that episode driving - then you don't get the same result in terms of penalties. That's the frustration that we sometimes have."

It's impossible to ignore the context for all this, on both sides.

For Verstappen, this incident came at the end of a long, hard season which has been his most impressive on a number of different levels.

He won the championship with two races remaining despite having a car that was fastest only for the first five grands prix, and he did it by driving with a consistent excellence that no-one was able to match. Everyone in F1 - including Russell - acknowledges that.

As Alonso put it on Thursday: "When I saw the car being the third, the fourth fastest car sometimes... when I saw McLaren win one-twos in one of the races before summer... in Zandvoort, Lando won with 25 seconds over the second or something like that... I thought, OK, the championship will be, tight until Abu Dhabi. But then it was not tight because one driver was outstanding."

At the same time, Verstappen has been holding together a team that at times has looked like it was falling apart at the seams.

It started with allegations of sexual harassment levelled at team principal Christian Horner, which he has always denied and of which he has been cleared by two internal investigations.

Verstappen's father Jos has been at loggerheads with Horner as a result of the allegations. They are rubbing along well enough at the moment, but Horner knows both Verstappens have to be treated with care.

Max has also faced the resignation of the greatest designer in F1 history, Adrian Newey, at least partly as a result of the allegations against Horner. And the departures of two other senior figures with whom he has worked closely for nearly a decade.

And he has led his team from the front through something close to a crisis with their car performance during the summer, and out the other side, culminating in his brilliant, cathartic, career-defining and essentially title-winning victory in the wet in Brazil from 17th on the grid.

Russell, meanwhile, as a director of the Grand Prix Drivers' Association, is at the forefront of the drivers' attempts get the FIA to rewrite the rules governing racing, a move that was triggered by Verstappen's driving against Norris in the US Grand Prix.

After Verstappen defended his lead in Austin with his trademark 'dive-bomb' defence - ensuring he complied with the rules by being ahead at the apex, but taking both cars off track on the exit, a move he used multiple times against Lewis Hamilton in 2021 - the drivers had had enough.

To a man, they like Verstappen as a person and respect him as a driver. But as Verstappen put it himself in a BBC Sport interview in Las Vegas: "How I am on the track is not necessarily how I am off-track. I know on track, if you want to win, if you want to be a champion, you do need to be on the limit."

And to many of his fellow drivers, Verstappen can drive in extremis in a manner they do not find acceptable.

The Austin incident was followed by a drivers' meeting in Mexico a week later in which the vast majority of the drivers made it clear they wanted the racing rules rewritten in a manner that no longer implicitly allowed, even encouraged, the dive-bomb defence.

After that meeting, Russell said 19 of the 20 drivers were "aligned on where it needs to be". He didn't say who the exception was. He didn't need to.

Two days later, at the Mexico City Grand Prix, Verstappen went even more extreme in his driving against Norris, earning himself two separate 10-second penalties for two different moves on one lap.

Russell said on Thursday: "Lewis is the champion I aspire to be - hard but fair, never beyond the line.

"I am not losing any sleep over it. I never had any intention of speaking out and speaking like this but he has gone too far with this personal attack and I am putting the truth out there and returning the favour."

There is one more added dimension. Their dispute also revives the dispute between their two teams, which has lain largely dormant since the bitter title battle between Verstappen and Hamilton in 2021.

After Horner called Russell "hysterical" in Qatar, Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff decided he should get in on the act. Wolff, unusually, attended Russell's news conference on Thursday, and indicated to a journalist he was keen to be asked a question, too.

He took a swipe at Horner: "Why does he feel entitled to comment about my driver? Yapping little terrier, always something to say."