Mindful of the price Lewis Hamilton paid for giving his racing instincts free rein in Japan, McLaren took a disciplined, low-risk approach to winning the title in Brazil.
It worked – but was so nearly derailed by the shower that arrived with a handful of laps remaining. Only the fact that the rain intensified on the final lap saved Hamilton from another devastating last-gasp title defeat.
As itv.com/f1’s expert analyst Mark Hughes explains, by that stage McLaren’s fate was no longer in its own hands, but in the lap of the gods – whatever tactical foresight it implausibly claimed afterwards…
Rain with just six laps to go presented a particularly horrible dilemma for McLaren at the Interlagos title decider.
They’d played the percentage game with Lewis Hamilton throughout the weekend, hadn’t gone chasing the Ferraris, knew they needed only to get him across the line fifth, and set about doing that in the most low-risk way possible.
The brief scare with the race about to begin when the rain appeared out of nowhere and delayed the start was made easier by the subsequent appearance of a safety car to clear up a first-lap accident.
This had the effect of nursing everyone through a risky period that was as brief as that initial shower.
Everyone got early back onto their dry tyres, McLaren bringing Hamilton in a little later than most and dropping him from his early fourth place to seventh.
Okay, let him off the leash a little here they decided, and he swiftly made his way past Jarno Trulli’s Toyota and Giancarlo Fisichella’s Force India, to be back in the place he needed to be – and that seemed to be that, a nice stalemate.
Felipe Massa was up front doing all he could do by dominating the race, his team-mate Kimi Raikkonen had given up on trying to entice Hamilton into racing with him; Lewis wasn’t to be tempted.
And even if he was, McLaren would have been ‘on the phone’ telling him not to.
But rain with six laps to go? That was terrible.
How hard would it rain? Hard enough that you’d easily get your pit stop time back by changing to wets? Or not quite?
Because if they got it wrong, there wasn’t enough time left to put it right.
There wasn’t a right answer, there couldn’t be. The only right answer would be the hindsight one.
Right now, in real time, you had to make a choice, a 50/50 gamble – and just hope it was the right one.
Leave it a lap too late to decide and you could either inadvertently win the race, finish at the back or at least finish lower than the necessary fifth place.
Of course, by having done only the minimum necessary up to that point McLaren had made themselves even more vulnerable now.
Had they treated it like any other race, allowed Hamilton to simply get on with racing the Ferraris up front, they’d have a bigger margin back to that fifth place now, a bigger cushion to insure against getting the call wrong.
But that was another hindsight point – too late to ponder it now, with the rain on its way and a decision to be made.
What to do? A horrible, horrible choice.
So they brought in team-mate Heikki Kovalainen first, used him as the guinea pig, just as Ferrari had done a lap earlier with Kimi Raikkonen.
In both cases, the results were inconclusive. The rain had arrived – but wasn’t falling on the whole track.
Up the hill from the tight left-hander, Juncao, and all the way down the pit straight it was wet. It was wet behind the pits, into turns six and seven.
It was wet right at the end of the middle sector – where it meets Juncao. But turns four and five and much of the middle sector were fairly dry.
Neither Raikkonen’s nor Kovalainen’s speed after they’d left the pits was conclusive enough to base a decision on before that call had to be made – so McLaren did what seemed to be the safe thing and brought Hamilton in.
Safe because the rain was here, and safe because most of the field by this time had also made the switch.
Most, but not all. The two Toyotas of Timo Glock and Trulli stayed out on their dries and hoped.
Glock was now 15s or so ahead of Hamilton, and only lapping three seconds slower. Even worse, Sebastian Vettel had just overtaken Hamilton on the track!
With just two laps to go Hamilton was not in place to clinch it, the last few moments of chaos seemingly about to deny him after spending all afternoon taking no risks, having it all under control. This couldn’t be happening!
Vettel’s car was way grippier in the wet than Hamilton’s. The forecast had been for a wet race and Toro Rosso had bet upon that and set Seb up with a lot of wing.
McLaren didn’t want to commit to so heavily, feeling they’d be fast enough even with a compromise downforce level to finish in their target position.
But here Vettel was showing they weren’t.
As Hamilton got off-line avoiding Robert Kubica unlapping himself, so his right-rear locked into Juncao, sending him out wide enough for Vettel to slip through. Out of the corner the Toro Rosso had better traction, and Seb was gone.
McLaren afterwards were trying to convey the impression it was all in hand, that they knew Glock would come back to them.
Martin Whitmarsh was claiming afterwards they were telling Hamilton not to race Vettel at this point, that he didn’t need to.
Hamilton contradicted this, saying: “They were telling me I had to repass Vettel. I couldn’t believe it.”
It didn’t look like Hamilton had the grip to repass Vettel even if he’d tried to.
Glock went into that last lap still 12s clear of Vettel and Hamilton, having lost just 3s to them the previous lap.
But now the rain increased in intensity, massively. As the Toyota arrived at the middle sector still well clear, Timo found the track awash.
Tiptoeing through there as his dry weather tyres lost all their temperature and their grip level fell off a cliff, he lost almost all that margin.
Massa had already taken the flag as the winner as Glock arrived at Juncao with Vettel and Hamilton hot on his tail.
The Toyota twitched, Timo tried getting on the gas, it spun its wheels, they were past in an instant, their grip advantage enormous, and McLaren got away with it: Hamilton had got back in position in the last corner of the last lap of the last race.
Actually, Glock’s gamble had paid off. He’d been seventh before the rain arrived and he finished sixth.
Had McLaren done this, it would have paid off for them too.
Hamilton had been running fifth and, looking at the time margins afterwards, he would have likely finished second had he stayed out.
He would have briefly led but Massa would have gobbled him up and passed in the final lap.
But that’s one of those hindsight calls. The rain might have increased a lap earlier than it did – in which case half the field would have powered past on their wets and the whole world would have castigated McLaren for leaving him out there.
There was no right answer, it was in the lap of the gods.