Horner: Sebastian thought F*ck you...

During an interview with Autoweek, Webber opened up on the incident that polarised the dominant team of the time, "First of all, we are pretty good mates or friends, we talk very well together now, Sebastian and I, so there’s no residual bitterness."

"At the time, was I an angel? No. Was he an angel? No. We did everything apart from food poisoning each other. The gloves were off. But that’s Formula 1. That’s how it should be."

"I don’t look for tailwind. I probably performed at my best when my back was against the wall, actually. When I was getting hit from all angles, I was probably fighting even harder."

Webber was asked to explain the Multi-21 team order, "It was a message to say that this is how the cars should finish, two should be in front of one. Multi-21 is how we do a controlled finish, which was discussed before the race and it was a perfect team structured scenario."

"We said okay, we race until the second pitstop, flat out, every man for himself… if we do 80% of the race and we’re good shape, we should shut the race down because we’ve got so many kettles boiling here, we have to do that. And honestly, it was going perfectly until Seb ignored that bit," insisted the no-nonsense Australian.

Horner recalled, "It was very difficult for Mark to accept at the time that, and I think if he looked back at it now with perspective and honesty, Sebastian was just quicker. So, therefore, Mark would use whatever tool he could to try and get under his skin."

"As a team, we were just trying to play a straight bat, but every now and again, you’d get a missile coming in and the situation got tougher and tougher."

“It probably culminated at the end of 2012 when Sebastian was fighting Alonso for the championship and Mark squeezed him up against the pit wall at the start of the race in Brazil, in the championship decider, which ultimately resulted in him getting turned around by Bruno Senna. Sebastian was hugely angry about that."

With reference to the 2013 Malaysian Grand Prix during which the controversy happened, Horner continued, "There was a hangover of that that led into Malaysia, literally two races later, split by four or five months."

"You had a situation where you have Mark in the car ahead, Sebastian on new tyres in the car behind. The tyres were pretty fragile, we’re telling them hold position and Sebastian thought: F*ck you.”

According to Horner, it was “100%” payback by the German who admitted as much during the team debrief before the next race, the team chief adding "that was probably as tense as it could get."

The incident attracted global headlines at the time and Horner added, “I had been invited to a lunch hosted by The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, which I expected there to be about 200 people at."

"There turned out not be 10 of us there. This was at Buckingham Palace. It was just after the Multi-21 scenario."

"I had this bizarre situation of having to deal with the drivers and then go to lunch with The Queen and Prince Philip and explain to her what Multi-21 was and why our Australian driver was particularly grumpy with our German driver."

"I had that conversation over lunch with The Queen and she seemed to show great interest in it,” the Red Bull chief added.