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Lando Norris was cautious after victory in Sao Paulo, one which puts him 24 points clear at the head of the table with three races to go.
“Seeing how quick Max was today I’m pretty disappointed we weren’t quicker,” he said. “I need to go to the team now and see where we weren’t quick enough.”
Later, in the media press conference, he was even more blunt. “If Max had started a bit further up, he’d have won. They were quicker than us today.”
Norris reckoned he’d had to push a lot harder to beat Kimi Antonelli’s Mercedes by 10s than when he’d won Mexico by half-a-minute.
Verstappen, starting from the pitlane, came through to a remarkable third, tight under Antonelli’s wing for the last few laps. The other title protagonist Oscar Piastri was restricted to fifth, just behind George Russell, his race compromised by a 10s penalty taken at his pitstop for a collision with Antonelli on the restart from an early safety car which accounted for the retirement of Charles Leclerc’s Ferrari.
Piastri could consider himself hard done-by, as it looked like a standard racing incident.
As Antonelli leant left to defend his place into the Senna Esses, Piastri locked up, narrowing them to a point of contact. The Merc slewed sideways but had its spin halted by heavy contact with Leclerc’s front-left tyre – which was sliced off the wheel.
Leclerc was out (as later would be the other Ferrari of Lewis Hamilton with floor damage), Piastri was up to second ahead of Antonelli but owed a penalty at his stop which would drop him behind not only both Mercs but also the recovering Verstappen.,
Norris’ weekend was straightforward in converting his comfort in the McLaren into a total of 33 points. But how to account for the wildly variable form of Verstappen’s Red Bull, out in Q1 on pure pace, but the fastest in the race?
We explained here on Friday the difficulties the team was facing in resolving the conflict between the car’s traits and this circuit’s demands. We explained how on Saturday, after finishing a distant fourth in the sprint, they gambled on a wholesale set-up change - increased ride height, softer suspension - which made it even slower in GP qualifying.
So for race day, with nothing to lose after qualifying only 16th, Verstappen's car was taken out of parc ferme and reconfigured yet again, including a brand new power unit and the pre-Mexico floor. At the third attempt, they’d found that the car’s narrow sweet spot around here did actually exist.
“I don’t think it’s a secret our window is narrow,” confirmed Red Bull team boss Laurent Mekies, “and difficult to find for a certain track layout and set of circumstances and conditions. We’ve been fighting to find it all weekend.”
But without that first drastic change - between the sprint and GP qualifying - the car would not have been so bad that Verstappen would have gone out in Q1 and it would not have taken it out of parc ferme.
Had he qualified around where he did for the sprint - on the third row - he’d have been driving a mediocre car in the grand prix from around the third row to a distant finish far, far behind Norris and likely behind the Mercedes too.
In hindsight it was only because the car was so bad in qualifying that it triggered a sequence of decisions that resulted in it being super-fast in the race. The sweet spot is narrow but has a very high peak.
“I think we were helped by the cooler temperatures too,” said Verstappen after his remarkable drive.
Again - as in Austin and Mexico - we are back to needing to understand the mercurial tyre behaviour on rubber so stressed by these cars.
The track was cool but the degradation was high enough that it was a default two-stop race. Here’s how a race engineer described the mechanism at play:
“Interlagos is one of the tracks where you are pushing to get the tyres hot enough. In the cool conditions, the tyres were not temperature-limited and were in a nice working window. When the tyres are like that you can push.
"What happens at some other places is the tyres are so hot that if you drive faster they get hotter and you end up slower - so you drive slowly, slow enough that they go on forever and you one-stop.
"But in the cold, the deg doesn’t always go down. Here the tyres can be pushed hard, there’s lots of energy in them. So instead of being limited by temperature, you are only limited by wear. The wear degradation becomes much higher because the cooler temperatures have freed everyone up to push.
"So with such high wear deg, the two-stop becomes quicker than the one-stop. So yes, sometimes colder temperatures makes the deg go up.”
The Red Bull, with the rear lifted up the way Interlagos's bumps demand, and with a small rear wing, was not generating anything like enough front end grip in the tighter curves of the middle sector on Saturday.
But by the same token, there was insufficient support from the rear to cure that by adding more front wing. The cooler, grippier conditions of Sunday - together with the final set-up changes - got the fronts to that critical threshold of grip and suddenly the car was working.
It was finally joined up in a way that allowed Verstappen to express his magic. The fronts could be leant on, using combined braking and cornering to rotate the car without so much steering lock and suddenly it was balanced.
The McLaren of course, was already balanced like this. It has a much wider operating window - and the Mercedes was in a good place too, helped further by the cool conditions, which it always likes as a car prone to overheat its tyres. But neither car was actually at its best.
The Red Bull - with three attempts at a set-up plus a new PU - was probably closer to its potential than either of them.
There was another bit of apparent Verstappen ill fortune which turned out to be the opposite: that early slow puncture in the sidewall of his hard compound rear tyre, picked up on the debris of the various early lap collisions.
Yes, coming after the lap seven restart and switching the punctured hards for a set of mediums cost him some immediate time – but only 10s. Because there was a VSC (for the Leclerc-Antonelli collision), which limited the speed of the pack.
He then made up way more time than those 10s by being on a tyre so much faster than the unsuitable hard. In fact, it put him on the theoretically perfect strategy for the day, one which was unavailable to anyone else. How so?
In that theoretical ideal way to run the race here as outlined by the engineer above – pushing hard and two-stopping – it was only that way because you have to use two tyre compounds. If you were freed of that regulatory constraint, the fastest way would have been to one-stop using two sets of mediums.
The medium C3 this weekend was durable and fast. You could still push it but the wear rate would allow you to do long enough stints to one-stop favourably. The soft C4 was way too delicate. The hard C2 way too slow.
By ditching the hard because of the puncture - at very little time loss compared to a pitstop under green flag conditions - Verstappen was potentially set to do what was very close to the perfect medium/medium one-stop.
Antonelli and Russell were pitted on laps 47 and 48/71, respectively from second and third. So Verstappen assumed the lead as Norris pitted at the end of lap 50 to get off the softs he’d been obliged to run in his second stint. The McLaren rejoined 8s behind the Red Bull on tyres 25 laps newer. Norris was lapping around 0.5s quicker.
More from the Brazilian Grand Prix
Winners and losers from F1's Brazilian Grand Prix
Our verdict on Piastri's penalty + Verstappen's Brazil comeback
Hamilton 'living a nightmare for a while' in maiden Ferrari season
Leclerc disagrees with F1 stewards over Piastri/Antonelli clash
Had Verstappen been able to get those old mediums to last, Norris was set to be with him three laps from the end. Could Verstappen have held off a newer-tyred Norris for three laps of Interlagos to take a sensational victory?
Red Bull didn’t believe the tyres would do it. Other teams were surprised when they brought Max in on lap 52, tempted by the presence in their garage of a brand new set of softs.
But no way was Verstappen going to catch Norris from there.
He overtook Russell around the outside of the Senna Esses and caught Antonelli with three laps to go - but Antonelli was perfect in utilising the Merc’s great traction out of Turns 2-3 so as not to be vulnerable at T4.
He did this for long enough for Verstappen to overwork his rear softs. Meanwhile, Norris was 10s up the road. But relieved and slightly concerned rather than elated.
A long way behind the McLaren/Mercedes/Red Bull contest, Ollie Bearman was best of the rest with a great drive to sixth in the Haas, protected from the pack behind by the one-stopping Racing Bulls of Liam Lawson. His two-stopping team-mate Isack Hadjar collided with him on the last lap trying to take seventh, but there were no hard feelings.
Nico Hulkenberg and Pierra Gasly took the final points to give their respective Sauber and Alpine teams some reward from a difficult weekend.
