The public opening of hostilities between the duelling title challengers ultimately came to dominate F1's blue-riband event with the contention surrounding Rosberg's pole on Saturday followed by the emergence of details of another incident between the drivers at the previous race in Spain.

Although Rosberg, who went on to win Sunday's race from Hamilton to regain the championship lead, has expressed confidence that he and his team-mate will be able to "move on", Hamilton has adopted a more entrenched position and made clear "we are not friends, we are colleagues" when asked by Sky F1 how he would go about rebuilding bridges with his 'friend' before the next race in Canada.

Amid reports on Monday that the pair were now not talking following a frosty podium ceremony, Hamilton has also revealed to Sky Sports News that a conciliatory move he made towards Rosberg at the start of the week in Monaco will not be repeated "anytime soon".

"I gave him a hug at the beginning of the weekend to really try to keep the relationship in a good place," the 29-year-old told Rachel Brookes.

"Then yesterday came about and that won't be happening again anytime soon."

Although Rosberg was cleared of any wrongdoing by race stewards for running off the road and triggering the yellow flags which effectively ended qualifying on Saturday, Hamilton didn't accept the German's apology and still appeared highly dubious about the incident on Sunday night.

"I wish you could have seen the data. I saw something late on last night and all I could do was smile," he was quoted as saying by The Guardian.

While relations between the Mercedes drivers, childhood friends and team-mates from karting, publicly broke down over the weekend, it emerged on Sunday that Hamilton had apologised to Rosberg after the last race in Spain for using an unauthorised engine mode during his attempts to ward off his team-mate as they battled for the win in the Barcelona race.

Hamilton later revealed Rosberg had done the same thing in their similarly tight duel at the front the month before in Bahrain.

"Today we were using all the modes. In the last race it was a mode that didn't really affect the outcome of the race," Hamilton said.

"We were told that we had to stay in a certain mode. Nico did it in Bahrain and I did it in Barcelona. In this race we stuck to the strategies we had to stick."

Hamilton, who also refused to answer a question in the post-race press conference about whether he would 'share a pizza' with Rosberg to sort out their differences, made clear that he would continue to give it his all in his battle for supremacy at Mercedes.

"Generally, there is a fierce battle between me and Nico and it will continue that way to I'm sure quite late in the season," he added.

"Nico's not had a single hiccup through the season so far. Obviously I had a car that didn't finish in Melbourne but otherwise it's still quite close, so I'm just going to keep my head up, keep pushing.

"I know the team are working hard for the both of us. The team can sometimes be in awkward positions, which they were yesterday, and their job is really to protect us both and that's what they did."