The silence since the Belgian Grand Prix earlier this month, when Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton nearly crashed at the start, was broken Thursday on the media day for this weekend’s Japanese Grand Prix, which returns to Fuji Speedway after a three-decade absence.

Alonso and Hamilton are locked in a fierce title battle as, with three round to go, the duo is separated by just two points – a gap that was significantly higher in the Briton’s favor before Alonso stringed together a sequence of strong results.

On the incident at the start of the Spa race, when Alonso squeezed him out of the track exiting the La Source hairpin on the first lap, Hamilton was clear:

“I will be a lot more aware of him around me now. You wait and see,” he said. "Here is another race, another day, but when we are out there we won't be giving any handouts, that is for sure.

"I probably will speak to him later in the weekend about this, because I haven't spoken to him since the last race and I have my feelings on what happened at the last race.

"I am driving to keep the car on the track and be fair to everyone, but if that is how aggressive he wants to be then I can be just as aggressive as anyone else.”

The Briton also took the opportunity to experiment with a bit of mind games of his own.

"I feel I have nothing to lose. He is the one defending the World Championship, so really he should have more pressure on him. But in the last two races he has done really well.

"I don't know if he has unloaded a load of baggage and is not feeling any weight off the team, or anything. He seems to be quite happy in the team all of a sudden, or with himself at least," he added, apparently referring to the conclusion of the spy saga in which Alonso provided the FIA with the e-mail exchange between himself and tester Pedro de la Rosa, the “new evidence” that triggered the extraordinary World Motor Sport Council meeting that excluded the silver team from this year’s constructor’s championship.

Alonso’s response was pragmatic.

"About the spying I have nothing to say...I will try to speak on the track and try to do my job. I really think that many of the things that have been said about the spying and about me are totally wrong and not the truth.

"But these things happen and I will not answer every day what they have been saying about me and about anything, I will not lose time on that. So at the moment I am completely focused on the last three races and that is the truth."

One final quote from Hamilton, speaking on the final three races of the year, further proved how there’s no love lost between the McLaren pair: "Fernando knows Shanghai very well, and he knows Brazil very well, but that has never stopped me from beating him in other places so I am not worried."