Initially the weight of opinion was that Mark Webber was an unfortunate victim, robbed of a third straight grand prix victory by an over-eager young teammate.

But, the more time that goes by since the Turkish GP, Webber is being seen, not exactly as a villain, but to have been in the wrong. Certainly that's how he's seen within his team, Red Bull Racing.

Yet, despite all the talk of what a disaster it was that Webber and Sebastian Vettel collided, Webber now leads the Formula One world championship outright.

The Australian who had such wretched luck for most of his first eight years in F1 salvaged third place from the race in Istanbul while Vettel came away without a championship point. He went from being equal leader of the championship with Webber to fifth in the standings.

Disaster is too dramatic a term, but if there was anything approaching it for Red Bull Racing in Turkey it was that it lost the lead in the constructors' world championship to McLaren-Mercedes.

More than a third of the way into the season now this is shaking down to be a tussle between the Renault-powered Red Bulls and the McLarens of Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button, the world champion drivers of the past two years and who showed, brilliantly, in Turkey how to overtake each other without damaging each other.

A senior McLaren team member told one of its drivers over the radio after the chequered flag in Istanbul: "We pushed them (Red Bull) and they cracked."

Perhaps that is the essence of it.

Red Bull has had a super car - the RB6 - from the outset of this season.

McLaren has developed technology called the F-duct that allows its drivers to manipulate their rear wings on the straights, giving them a top-speed advantage.

It is a feature other teams are now racing to add to their cars.

While McLaren has narrowed the gap to Red Bull, Ferrari has lost its way and the Mercedes factory team - which won the constructors' championship last year as BrawnGP - is still a comparatively long way off the real pace, with Michael Schumacher more than half a minute behind the McLarens in Istanbul.

While there has been a huge blame game between Vettel (pictured above, showing his displeasure after the crash) and Webber over Sunday's collision, the biggest mistake perhaps was by the Red Bull crew on the pit wall.

Team orders are officially forbidden in F1 after the years of Schumacher's teammates at Ferrari having to move aside for him and the infamous McLaren handover from David Coulthard to Mika Hakkinen in Melbourne in 1998.

But surely Red Bull could have asked, advised, even instructed Webber, who had dropped a little engine power in Istanbul to conserve fuel, simply not to impede the faster, approaching Vettel if he made an overtaking move.

Red Bull Racing's aim is to finish first and second in every race. The order in which the drivers finish is incidental to it.

It is understandable that Webber would be reluctant to wave a white flag of surrender to Vettel, over whom he had had a clear edge in the previous two GPs in Monaco and Spain.

Webber has been in the best form of his career, can sniff a world title and looked to be getting a psychological advantage over a precocious young teammate who has been seen as a chosen one, anointed to become a world champion.

These incidents happen in an instant though. Webber and Vettel were racing at somewhere between 250kmh and 300kmh.

It is easy to get blasé about the speeds. In the final laps of yesterday's Indianapolis 500 (won by Scotsman Dario Franchitti, with Australians Will Power and Ryan Briscoe out of luck) the television commentators lamented that speeds had dropped to 216, 211, 206 even 202.

"You could almost get out and run faster than that," one commentator said as the Indy drivers also conserved fuel.

Yet those speeds were miles an hour, so still well over 300kmh - and they were average lap, not top, speeds!

But back to Turkey.

Before the media cajoled Webber into saying Sunday's collision was "a f...ing disaster", he had been asked if there was a reason Vettel "had a jump on you on that particular lap".

"Hmm. Maybe," Webber replied.

Then he was asked: "Did you come out of the previous corner a bit slower on that lap?"

"Hmm. You guys need to dig more, somewhere else," he replied.

Just what Webber is alluding to there is still not clear two days later.

Red Bull Racing team principal Christian Horner initially seemed to have empathised with Webber, although he quickly adapted his view to the team's drivers needing to "give each other room".

But the man who has the most power in Red Bull racing affairs, Dr Helmut Marko - an ex F1 driver and an Austrian contemporary of the energy drink company's tycoon Dietrich Mateschitz - never had any doubt.

"Sebastian was ahead, at least two metres, there was a corner coming, so he had to move into his line - he couldn't have braked on the dirt," Marko said.

Meaning not amused with Webber not getting out of Vettel's way and the pair going on to finish first and second.

It is probably grossly overstated, but in any such battle the German speakers have the money on top of expertise; the Anglo-Saxons only expertise. In F1 both are essential.

Red Bull Racing now needs to regroup for the Canadian GP in Montreal on June 13 - and it is more likely than not that Webber and Vettel can put the enmity behind them.

Otherwise the greatest obstacle to Red Bull and either of its drivers winning the world championship this year will be the team itself.