Do teams genuinely regard their home grand prix as a special event? In a word: yes. For the British Grand Prix we had things like a McLaren Grandstand at Becketts filled with our friends, supporters and colleagues from the factory. In a sport that requires the team to travel around the world and be apart from their loved ones, it's always a pleasure to be home.

One of F1’s great innovations in recent times has been the Hot Laps programme. Lando was piloting former British Grand Prix winner Johnny Herbert in a McLaren 720S on Thursday when he went off and beached it at the famously fast Becketts corner. When Lando returned to the garage – and for the rest of the day – his crew treated the incident with the tact and diplomacy for which they are famed... He was smiling about it. Eventually.

While pit-lanes change from week to week, the garage order remains the same – most of the time. McLaren are housed in the sixth garage for 2019, between Haas and Racing Point. The sloping pit-lane and some building work at Silverstone obscure the view of the garages from the grandstand, and thus there’s a reshuffle and we found ourselves between Red Bull and Williams this weekend. It requires a little bit of co-ordination between team managers and chief mechanics because there are accommodations to be reached over how best to not trip over each other in the pit-lane.

Not everyone from the McLaren HQ gets to come to the track. Another side to the home race is that it gives the team a slightly shorter logistics chain, and thus an opportunity to get fresh parts onto the car right up to the last minute. The factory worked wonders to get upgrades intended for the German Grand Prix onto the car a race early. It isn’t just drivers that deliver performance to the car.

The basis for a good race is a good Friday. Getting through the programme in FP1 and FP2 sets-up the whole weekend, and while it isn’t always apparent from the outside, some Fridays are tougher than others. Silverstone was hard work. The freshly-laid asphalt was an unknown factor and the wind was whipping across the Northamptonshire plateaux, creating problems in the braking zones. Several red flags and on-off rain also disrupted attempts to find a rhythm. The team were very satisfied to get through their planned programme in reasonably good shape.

There’s a lot of engineering science in F1 designed to take luck out of the equation – but sport relies on that magical ingredient and it does not relinquish willingly its grip on F1. The random element at Silverstone was the Safety Car that came out on Lap 21 of the 52. The timing was terribly unlucky for Lando, who had pitted – but an unexpected gift for Carlos, who had not.

When the car is on track, driver and pit-wall are speaking on an open channel. Codes, therefore, are employed, with much discussion of target laps, plan A, plan B and so on. The codes were not particularly difficult to decrypt at Silverstone, with every team thinking along the same lines. Plan A was the two-stop race, Plan B the more marginal one-stopper. It didn’t go the way everyone was expecting – which is why there are contingency plans.

The battle with our engine supplier was particularly fierce with Daniel Ricciardo chasing Carlos Sainz. It was intense, and while Carlos and race engineer Tom Stallard were calm under immense pressure, the rest of the garage was a little twitchy. Silverstone did a good job of highlighting the relative strengths of the two cars, with Ricciardo closing up through the slow corners of the first sector, and Carlos pulling away through the fast corners of the second. Sixth place for Carlos was a great result, and a superb defensive drive.