In the past we’ve seen storms in Bahrain, and even a couple of showers, but this was the first overcast weekend from start to finish. There were a few spots of rain but nothing to prevent the cars running normal dry session programmes. The absence of sunshine was actually very helpful. It dropped the afternoon track temperature to 30°C from its usual 50°C, and meant the FP1 and FP3 sessions – usually too hot to get any useful data for the after-dark qualifying session and race – were very valuable. 

The garages at the Bahrain International Circuit are some of the best in F1 but it wouldn’t be a proper F1 weekend without an annoying detail designed to frustrate the trackside team. This weekend it was the position of the pitbox, which was dead centre outside the garages. Usually, it’s offset such that if one car is ending a run, the other car can still get out of its stall. This week, no such luck. Neither car could exit the garage when the other car was due in. That required a lot more cooperation across the garage than usual – and a few scowls whenever the other driver decided to stay out an extra lap – or come in early. 

Sometimes in F1, the simple solutions are the most effective. Windspeed and direction have a big effect on F1 cars, particularly F1 cars that are on the absolute limit during a qualifying lap. There’s a network of ground stations dotted around the circuit that feed weather data to the official F1 weather service, and the car also has pitot sensors that take direct readings – but F1 loves a big flag, and the Sakhir Tower, at the end of the paddock, has one of the best. Head of Strategy and Sporting Randy Singh, from his perch on the pitwall, somehow accrued the additional job of chief flag watcher during qualifying, feeding information to the drivers via the race engineers about how the flag was behaving before each run. It was surprisingly effective. 

This wasn’t the smoothest technical weekend the team has ever had. Carlos’ brake failure in qualifying was fairly prominent but, behind the scenes, the team was battling network gremlins. The most serious of which knocked out much of the data feed to the pitwall for FP2, and deprived the race engineers in the garage of live TV pictures and GPS data. While that was being addressed the workaround was having the crew in Mission Control back at the MTC relay information to the garage. That worked very well – but it’s not a condition you’d want to endure for very long. It did lead to the bizarre – though not as rare as you might think – situation of everyone watching on TV at home having more information than the people in the garage at times. For instance, while the drivers and race engineers knew a red flag had halted FP2 for a second time, they weren’t aware that a dog running around the track caused it. 

While the team had been relatively happy with the car at the end of FP2, the same could not be said for the start of FP3 – both drivers were not impressed. This presented their race engineers with the classic day/night conundrum. Despite being overcast, track temperatures in the afternoon were still different to what the drivers had experienced the previous evening – so did they chase the track and tweak the set-up of the car to improve the drivers' confidence, or leave the car alone in the expectation the track would come to them in qualifying? Ultimately, it was a compromise between the two and both drivers ended FP3 much happier than when they started it – reflected in the fact they finished the session P5 and P7.

Going into qualifying, confidence was high – which is usually when things go wrong. The car looked fine in Q1 and then Carlos, out of nowhere, had a rear brake failure in Q2. Lando made it through to Q3 and started brightly with a brilliant banker lap on old tyres – but then couldn’t make the next step on his new set at the end of the session. The garage was quiet on Saturday evening. P9 and P15 left the team with a mountain to climb. 

The worst kind of red flag is the one that you don’t immediately understand. While the race engineers will be watching a feed of their car, the rest of the garage watches the race from the same source as everybody at home. When the timing monitors flash up the red flag banner but there’s no TV footage, that’s immediately concerning – because it means there’s a picture the TV director is reluctant to show. That wasn’t aided by the drivers rounding Turn Eight and heading down to Romain Grosjean’s crash site (because Turn Three is next to Turn Nine), seeing the fireball and voicing concern, asking questions their race engineers couldn't answer. Despite being flat-out getting ready to receive the cars in the pitlane, everyone kept casting glances at the monitors. There was a palpable ripple of relief all the way down the pitlane when the all-clear came through.

At the chequered flag, the McLaren garage was more energised than it has been all season – including the two races where Lando and Carlos finished on the podium. The chaotic nature of the Bahrain Grand Prix is going to disguise the very, very strong race pace both drivers exhibited to drag themselves up the order. They gained two places from other cars having trouble but the rest they made the hard way with passes on track, either forced by excellent strategy decisions or appropriated by sheer opportunism, and all enabled by having really strong race pace. There aren’t too many Sundays where it all clicks like this.