There's a certain symmetry about Mark Webber winning the World Endurance Championship a week before grand prix racing moves to Abu Dhabi and the place where he came within a whisker of taking the F1 title in 2010. Webber will be the first to tell you that the difference between the camaraderie within Porsche and the sense of suspicion invading Red Bull at the time is huge. If you doubt that, then the corrosive effect of Helmet Marko's influence is laid bare in Webber's book 'Aussie Grit: My Formula One Journey'.

As you might expect from the no-nonsense Aussie, he tells it like it is -- or was -- during seven years racing for the team a few miles up the road from his home in Buckinghamshire. Webber is the first to admit Red Bull played a massive part in his racing career -- as it would when you've won all nine of your Grands Prix there, including two memorable victories at Monaco.

The first in Monte Carlo came on 16 May 2010 -- "perhaps the greatest day of my F1 career" -- a week after winning in Spain. Webber was on a roll and it caught Sebastian Vettel's attention -- which became an obvious concern for Marko and therefore Christian Horner, doing his best to keep everyone happy. We'd been told that the chassis of Vettel's car had been fractured but, according to Webber, it was something else that was cracking.

"Somewhere in the post-race [Monaco] mix, there was talk that Sebastian wanted my chassis. In the end, Christian Horner took me aside and told me that he had given Marko the opportunity to tell Sebastian that he had a cracked chassis -- which he didn't -- to help him rationalise the fact that he had just been well and truly beaten, for the second race in a row, by the old Aussie in the other car. It seems it had been affecting his confidence, and to Seb that's everything. It seemed beyond his comprehension that I could beat him fair and square; for him there had to be another reason why."

After that came Turkey and the infamous collision as they fought for the lead, an incensed Seb retiring on the spot, Mark going on to finish third. It was only after the race that Webber's short term sense of annoyance would become something more permanent as he returned from the FIA press conference to find Marko was blaming him, a view that Horner was not going out of his way to moderate for fear, according to Webber, of upsetting the man who was clearly the conduit between the team and its boss, Dietrich Mateschitz.

"To maintain harmony within the team (and you've got to remember there were 800 people involved), the focus had to be on keeping Marko happy, which meant making sure Vettel's side of the garage was happy. Team Webber was old enough and ugly enough to understand that, but Christian insisted on keeping up the pretence that everything was even-handed, despite growing evidence that it was anything but. All we wanted was to be told the truth but he couldn't do that, and for me that was a sign of weakness. It was at this stage that I began losing respect for him. It must have been uncomfortable for him to be a front-line spokesperson for the team without enjoying any real power within the hierarchy."

Clearly, Vettel is not seen as the bad guy in this instance although, unsurprisingly, that view changes in the 'Multi-21' saga a few years later. This may be a small part of Webber's full and engaging story, but it does reflect the author's refusal to hold back on trenchant views and why the book as a whole is compelling reading. It also confirms why there will be no exchange of Christmas cards between the Webber and Marko households.