At Silverstone last weekend, Carlos’ car was running a few mysterious degrees hotter than Lando’s. With no obvious cause, and taking no chances, the team ran slightly looser bodywork with a little more cooling for Carlos. Under other circumstances, that would warrant a full, post-race diagnosis but heading directly to Spain, the research had to be rather more empirical. Thus, for Friday morning in Spain, Carlos had a new chassis – and the team planned a set of experiments across both cars to find the cause of his woes.

The team weren’t expecting a particularly good weekend in Spain, and on Friday had looked a little off the pace. Both cars had, however, got through their programmes in FP1 and FP2 uninterrupted – and that presented the team with a wealth of data on which to base set-up changes for Saturday. The car was instantly better at the start of FP3 and that pace carried through the session. The garage went into qualifying with a little more confidence than they’d had at the start of the day. 

Having changed chassis, and tested radiators, water pumps and sensors, without finding the smoking gun to his cooling woes, the team bit the bullet and elected to give Carlos a new ICE, Turbo, MGU-K and MGU-H for Saturday and Sunday. This was a race ahead of schedule – but the old components will go into the pool and see further use this year, probably on Fridays. As for Carlos this weekend, his cooling problem went away – and he had the bonus of a little more power for his home grand prix.

Presenting the car in impeccable condition has always been a McLaren hallmark – but the stakes are raised during qualifying. Not a race goes by without the race engineers in their pre-session remarks urging their car crew to be vigilant for any splash of mud, bug impact or stray glob of rubber. Polishing the car between the runs to a mirror sheen might be worth the thousandth of a second that makes all the difference. This weekend it was – or at least it nearly was. Lando qualified for Q3 with 1:17.166, Sebastian Vettel failed with 1:17.168. That’s less time than it takes for a housefly to flap its wings.

The race was a real mix of one- and two-stop strategies. Carlos and Lando were both running two – but given the difficulty of overtaking at the Circuit de Catalunya, the danger was always going to be pitting into traffic. That meant the strategy team not only had to do the usual job on monitoring their own cars and those of their nearest rivals, but had to plot virtually every other car on track, from the leaders who might generate time-sapping blue-flags, to backmarkers running long with serious potential to halt a charge. At some point during the race, virtually every car on track was being discussed on the radio – which is quite rare.

Many drivers struggle with expectations at their home grand prix – but not Carlos. If anything, the pressure makes him diamond-sharp. This was his sixth Spanish Grand Prix and he maintained a perfect record of scoring at every one. On debut in 2015, he finished ninth, and has followed that with sixth, seventh, seventh, eighth last year and now another sixth.

One of the jobs on the pre-race checklist is to have the driver test the button that activates the drinks pump – because in a hot cockpit, having access to fluid is a necessity rather than a luxury. Of course, pouched in the hot car, on a hot day, it isn’t necessarily a cold drink. “It already tastes like tea,” said a mournful Carlos by way of a confirmation on the grid. At the chequered flag, race engineer Tom Stallard, mindful of weight on the scales, told Carlos, “remember, drink your tea.” “Yes,” said Carlos. “It’s time for English afternoon-tea.”