Things might have been so different if Formula One ringmaster Bernie Ecclestone had got his way a few months back.

Ecclestone wanted to award gold, silver and bronze medals to the three drivers on the podium at each grand prix, and the driver with the most gold at the end of the season would be the world champion.

Under that scenario Mark Webber would now be leading the world championship.

The Aussie has won three GPs this year, each of his main rivals only two.

Yet the indications are that Webber's team, Red Bull Racing, still doesn't rate him title material.

It let him know, yet again, at the weekend's British GP that he's very much its second fiddle.

Its anointed one is Sebastian Vettel, the German wunderkind 10 years Webber's junior, a precocious talent but in a very real sense still a boy on a man's mission.

Five times this season Vettel has had the pole position. Yet he has only two wins from the 10 races.

Too often he blows it, although some of his retirements have been due to mechanical failures.

Webber hasn't been perfect either. Just two weeks before the British GP he squandered his front row start, lost his equilibrium, ran up the back of a tortoise bearing the famous name Lotus, pirouetted through the air and wrote off his thoroughbred car worth millions of dollars.

Red Bull Racing's RB6 is a super car. It may well go down in history as one of the best of all time.

Yet this team, still in short pants by F1 standards, trails old campaigner McLaren by a hefty 29 points in the constructors' world championship.

McLaren is maximizing its results, even when its MP4-25 cars are not good enough for Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button to win. Second and fourth in Britain was a sensational outcome for that pair after they were so far off the pace early in the weekend. Button made up 10 places in the race.

Hamilton leads the drivers' championship with 145 points, Button has 133, Webber 128 and Vettel 121. Ferrari's Fernando Alonso, on 98, is fast losing touch.

With the RB6s, Webber and Vettel should be finishing first and second more often than not, yet only twice have they done that - in Malaysia in early April, where Vettel won, and at Monaco in mid-May, where Webber was imperious.

So Webber has now won two of the classic GPs, at Monaco and Silverstone, and dominated in Barcelona too.

Yet he still feels - and is made to feel - that he's playing second fiddle within Red Bull Racing to Vettel.

The team went to Silverstone with new nose cones for the RB6s that had dual vanes of carbon at the tips of their wings, instead of just the one previously.

It was an aerodynamic tweak intended to ensure Red Bull kept its speed edge on McLaren.

In practice on Saturday morning the front of Vettel's car broke at more than 270km.

For the afternoon's qualifying the team took the new nose off Webber's car and gave it to Vettel.

Webber found out, cruelly, that Red Bull not only gives you wings, it also takes them away.

Vettel beat him to pole position by 0.143 seconds. The margin between the pair in practice had been 0.034 seconds.

Red Bull Racing principal Christian Horner says the decision to give Vettel Webber's nose was because the German was ahead in the world championship at that stage.

Webber saw it very differently. That, despite Horner's repeated platitudes that the pair will be given equal opportunity to win, Vettel is the team's favoured son.

He could not disguise his anger, but he contained it. His father, Alan, noticed on Sunday morning that Webber was still wound up about what he saw as a slight, that the team sees Vettel as the heir to the world championship rather than giving him a fair dinkum crack at it.

It crossed Webber's mind that he would not have signed a contract extension for next year so early if he had known that this was going to be the way the game was going to be played.

Yet come the race a few hours later Webber blasted away perfectly, withstood the intimidation of a weaving Vettel, who had spun his tyres too much.

Vettel promptly punctured his right rear tyre by rubbing the charging McLaren of Hamilton, found himself off the track and in the pits, stone motherless last in the field of 24, at the end of the first lap for fresh rubber.

Webber was untouchable out front, as he was in Barcelona and Monaco, while Vettel only salvaged seventh place at the finish thanks to a safety car helping to bunch up the pack.

Webber's radio message to Horner after taking the chequered flag - "Not bad for a No. 2 driver!" - won't become as famous as his screaming "Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes" after his first GP victory in Germany a year ago.

But it was very pointed. And Horner, mindful of the huge marketing bubble in which F1 operates, told Webber now the team would like to see a smile from him again - obviously for the benefit of all the cameras.

Having fired his "shot" at Horner on global television, Webber was then very careful with his words during the post-race interviews.

He felt, for public consumption, that this victory might have been karma.

But his real feelings came through in The Guardian newspaper in London - that he had delivered "an Australian response" to the team's favoritism towards Vettel and "a little upper cut" to the German wunderkind.

Asked whether he would go for a drink with Vettel he replied, "Definitely not."

And he made it known that he doesn't want to hear the German national anthem played for a Vettel victory on July 25 at Hockenheim, venue for the German GP this time rather than the Nurburgring where Webber won last year.

But he admitted that "if Seb was in the ocean and he was struggling, he was drowning, I would be out having a crack at saving him".

Unlike Australia's last F1 world champion, of 30 years ago, Alan Jones, who would make no secret that he would have left a rival or even - perhaps more so - a teammate to drown.

While Webber has somehow been remarkably constrained in this latest spat, his crew showed plenty of mongrel when packing up at Silverstone on Sunday night, taking his car's older nose, with the single-vane front wing, and waving it at Vettel's crew on the other side of the garage.

Rubbing their noses in it, you could say.

Perhaps Webber has surprised Red Bull that he is more, much more, than just a quick qualifier who can be a serviceable sidekick to, initially, the accomplished David Coulthard and now Vettel.

And perhaps it is, or will be, surprised at his steel - that he will assert, even impose, himself on this still immature team now that he has the scent of a world title in his nostrils.

Horner is right on one thing: that "there is a bit more emotion attached" to the standard of a driver's machinery now that Webber is in a top team he could hardly have believed possible early in his career.

He still needs to be much more consistent in the remaining nine races. He probably needs to win at least another four GPs, perhaps five or six, and pick up heaps of points in those he doesn't win.

He wants better treatment, indeed greater respect, from Red Bull Racing now that he's its leading driver in the championship, not Vettel.

Maybe it's a sign of the times that Bernie Ecclestone didn't get his way with the medals, and that Webber - for so long the guy with the wretched luck - is at last a title contender.

As we've said here before, like the Aussie world champions before him - Sir Jack Brabham, whose roots were in dirt-track speedway racing, and Alan Jones, who hit the sweet spot in a narrow window between 1979 and 1981 - Webber would be an unfashionable world champion.

But he might just be the fashion Red Bull Racing is going to need to run with this season.