The team was guaranteed fourth in the Constructors’ Championship – but the drivers still had individual goals to achieve. Carlos’ mission was to secure sixth in the Drivers’ Championship. He arrived tied on 95 points with Pierre Gasly, but classified lower on account of Gasly’s superior finishing record. Carlos needed to outscore the Frenchman, and not finish too far behind Alex Albon, who was 11 points behind. Lando, meanwhile, went to Abu Dhabi 11th in the table, a point behind Sergio Pérez and two ahead of Kimi Räikkönen. A top-10 championship position beckoned.

Just before FP1, Lando revealed his Abu Dhabi helmet complete with tribute to performance engineer Andrew Jarvis. Jarv departs F1 after this race and, in the words of Led Zeppelin, ‘Going to California’. In addition to Jarv’s disconcerting head, the legend ‘Meee shoes’ (best wailed in a West Yorkshire accent) was emblazoned on Lando’s lid. The latter a reference to an incident involving a hotel pool, a playful but focussed group of mechanics and a brand-new pair of kicks.

Practice at Yas Marina is a quirky experience, given that the track for FP1 and FP3 is entirely different to the track for FP2, qualifying and the race. The disparity is caused by a temperature differential, with the asphalt mid-afternoon at least 10°C hotter than in the evening, when the sessions finish under lights. The afternoon sessions accordingly, aren’t of great use for setup – but at this stage of the season, the team knows the car pretty well. Those sessions were very much focused on data gathering for 2020 and the MCL35.

The trend that has emerged over the last few races is of the team having to put in a lot of effort to locate performance in the car. It all came good in qualifying – with Lando qualifying P7 – aka ‘best of the rest’. Carlos had been the faster of the pair all weekend, but he got caught in the traffic jam at the end of Q3, didn’t get the luxury of preparing the tyres how he wanted, and consequently didn’t make the gains he expected. Carlos was pretty angry after the session. “The only thing that could go wrong, did go wrong,” he said.

Carlos and Lando were fast enough to make it into Q3, but sentenced to starting the grand prix on a used Soft tyre that would compromise their race. The prized position was P11 – but with no way of arriving there intentionally, there was no option but to try your best and qualify as high as possible. That said, Will Joseph, Lando’s race engineer opined in his pre-qualifying briefing that failing to get out of Q2 ‘would not be a disaster’.

The strategy for both cars was to make the Soft tyre last as long as possible, and then do a long stint on the Hard compound and hope to hold off the cars behind that were able to run a more balanced strategy. Our hopes of making that stick were severely dented by a DRS gremlin causing the FIA to shut the system down for the first 33 minutes of the race. Lando pitted on lap eight, Carlos on lap 12 and both got boxed in behind Romain Grosjean, unable to regain track position in cars set up to overtake on the straights using DRS.

Sergio Pérez relentlessly closed in on Lando over the last nine laps. The final five saw the pair nose-to-tail and Lando, on destroyed tyres, had to put up a robust defence. He was distraught to lose the battle for seventh on the last lap and had some harsh things to say about his own performance – views that were at odds with the garage, where everyone thought he did a brilliant job to take it that far.

In Brazil, it was Carlos that grimly hung on with shot tyres; in Abu Dhabi, just to prove he’s not a one-trick pony, he went the other way, jettisoning the one-stop and pitting for a set of Mediums with 15 laps to go. That left him P14. With Albon running only sixth, and Gasly effectively out of contention after a long early pit-stop, sixth in the drivers’ standings was his for the taking – providing he could break into the top 10.

The garage has had some tense moments this year, but the worst arrived when Carlos got into P11 and onto the back of Nico Hülkenberg’s Renault. Having taken most of the life out of his tyres, Carlos opted to drop back for a few laps, cool them and gamble everything on the last lap. When he made the pass for P10, the garage erupted. The fireworks going off above the main straight felt like they were for us. After a long and sometimes difficult season, to be fighting and winning a battle in the last third of the final lap was an excellent way to sign off 2019.

At the chequered flag, Lando launched into an oration praising Jarv, much to everyone’s amusement. Tom Stallard, Carlos’ race engineer, was telling his driver it would be okay to unclench now, and the rest of the garage was busy with cheering, fist bumps, handshakes and ice cream. That lasted all of five minutes before chief mechanic Kari Lammenranta cleared his throat and said: “not wanting to be a party-pooper, but we have a few jobs to do.” Most of the team is staying on in Abu Dhabi for the tyre test this week.