Take nothing away from Lando Norris or the McLaren Formula 1 team here for they did a perfect job together in securing Monaco Grand Prix victory ahead of a very fast Ferrari driven by that Monaco master Charles Leclerc.
But the strategic implications of the new two-stop stipulation made for a very strangely conducted race - without any of the surprise position jumbling the changes were designed to engender.
With none of the safety cars or red flags which might have combined with the two-stop to create a shock result, the finishing order of the top 10 differed from the grid order only through Lewis Hamilton having a grid penalty to recover from and Fernando Alonso retiring.
But the journey to that finishing order probably looked a little confusing at times as teams inevitably gamed the new system around a track on which you can easily drive five seconds or more off the pace and not be overtaken.
The game - as revealed first by Racing Bulls, which then triggered Williams and Mercedes into the same - was to use the second car to back up the field behind it, creating a gap for your lead car to pit and drop into. Then you'd use the lead car to return the favour, backing up the field for the second car to pit without position loss. Then, if necessary, switch positions between the two cars.
We almost got the randomising safety car a couple of times. Gabriel Bortoleto nosed the Portier barriers on the first lap trying to defend from being overtaken by Kimi Antonelli but got going again. There was a VSC for that. Pierre Gasly broke his front suspension after hitting the back of Yuki Tsunoda, but he managed to limp it back to the pits. Alonso managed to coast his broken Aston Martin to a safe place on the 38th of the 78 laps.
So without the randomising, what we got instead was the system gaming. But neither McLaren nor Ferrari really committed to that game in a big way. So once Norris had won the start from Leclerc, with Oscar Piastri slotting into third after fighting off Max Verstappen into Ste Devote, their battle was a fairly conventional one.
Piastri did run off the pace for a while in the opening stint but only to save the tyres so that he could mount an undercut attempt on Leclerc and thereby take the Ferrari off Norris's back. But it wasn't from the same playbook as we'd see from Racing Bulls and the others.
Piastri's attempt at pulling Leclerc off Norris wasn't needed - because Norris had enough of a gap to drop into to be able to stop first as soon as Ferrari brought in Hamilton on lap 18. Norris came in on the very next lap. Piastri's attempt to then undercut Leclerc fell foul of a two-second delay tightening the left-rear wheel. This gave Leclerc the luxury of a couple of extra laps before stopping and rejoining still ahead of Piastri, still behind Norris. All very conventional.
Had they got Piastri out ahead of Leclerc at those first stops, then they could in theory have gamed the system by using Piastri to back-up the others prior to the second stops - and then used Norris to back up the field after pitting to create the gap for Piastri. As it was, McLaren and Ferrari had stalemated each other into the top three grid order.
Hamilton hadn't really been available to aid Leclerc's cause as he'd lost so much time behind Alonso's much slower car in the first stint. Although he was able to overcut past that and Hadjar's Racing Bull, he was by then far enough back that he suffered further delays getting through the bunched traffic caused by Racing Bulls' Liam Lawson playing the team game.
That left Verstappen in the lead. Unlike the three cars ahead of him on the grid, he'd not started on the mediums, but on his single set of hards. He had only a single set of mediums left after that. Meaning his final stint would have to be on softs.
So his strategy was always to run the first two stints long. That way also, he might've benefitted from a safety car or red flag after they'd stopped but before he had, thereby getting his regulation third set of tyres without a pitstop (or a cheap one). That was his only hope of winning the race.
He made his first stop on lap 27 and then ran that set of mediums for 50 laps until one from the end. But the safety car never came. Fourth was par for the course for a Red Bull which just doesn't like the kerbs and bumps of this place.
Red Bull couldn't do the gaming trick either - simply because the other car of Yuki Tsunoda was too far back to be brought into play and so he'd been pitted on the first lap, hoping for an early safety car. Which just snowballed into massive delays behind the slow lap gaming going on ahead.
It initially looked like the two Red Bull teams may have been operating as one as Lawson initiated the back-up strategy. But actually it was purely in aid of team-mate Hadjar, who pitted for a set of softs on lap 15 and replaced them with a set of hards just four laps later, while Lawson kept everyone off his back.
That secured Hadjar his sixth-place result - and if there'd then been a safety car before only Norris of those in front of him had even made their first stops, a sensation would have been on the cards.
Once Lawson had done that, the following Williams of Alex Albon and Carlos Sainz were pretty much obliged to do the same. But Lawson didn't stop until the 31st lap - and only then could Williams begin to put its similar plan into effect. It took until lap 50 for that to cycle through to Albon returning the favour.
Mercedes still hadn't stopped either car at that point - because they were trapped there. Stopping earlier would have just cycled them even further back amid all the backing-up going on. Tsunoda had proven the folly of that.
George Russell's ploy of missing out the chicane to pass the slow-driving Albon and taking the penalty sort of backfired in that he got given a drivethrough. Antonelli then did the back-up job for Russell but they ran out of laps for Russell to do the return favour for Antonelli, who finished a solid last.
This was an important result for Norris and a prestigious one of course. But he claimed he derived greater satisfaction from his pole of the day before.
"I'd lost my groove," he said. "I’ve had it all my life and it had gone. But yesterday I felt like I’d got it back."
