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On Sunday evening at Suzuka, quite a lot later than usual, the team finished pack-down, saluted the applauding fans, and headed back to the hotel to pack a bag, locate a passport and come home. The Singapore-Japan double-header is a strenuous trip: the heat and humidity, the long-haul travel and the unusual working hours make it one of the more difficult sections of the calendar, but the team travelled home with a sense of a job well done.

No one scored more than our 57 points across the last two races, and included in the pack-up were three new trophies to display on the Boulevard, including Oscar’s first F1 podium.

Japan was our best result of the year to date. Oscar bagged his first podium, Lando notched his 10th, and we scored more points than any of our competitors, taking our first double podium since 2021.

Oscar scored McLaren’s 499th podium, 17.109 seconds after Lando had taken our 498th. The young Australian is the 33rd driver to stand on the podium for McLaren across 58 seasons of Formula 1, and the 12th of those to collect their first F1 trophy with McLaren. As he said at the chequered flag, when being interviewed on the grid by Damon Hill: “I’ll remember it for a long, long time.”

But how did it all unfold, and what was key to the impressive result? The MCL60 certainly suited the fast corners and high downforce requirements of Suzuka… but there’s also a lot of time to be found in having a smooth run into the race.

Ultimately, the team will judge success by the number of points it brings home… but satisfaction tends to come from a broader range of metrics. The post-race debrief (and subsequent analysis throughout this week) will look beyond the bottom line.

Elements such as the clarity of decision-making, quality of strategy and pit-stops, how close to reality the team’s baseline assumptions were and how well the team worked operationally will all be considered. How smoothly the practice programme was delivered will also be analysed along with IT problems or issues in the garage or gantry. And, of course, there’s the obvious metric of whether there were any gremlins with the car.

It’s not a hard and fast rule, but, in general, the smaller the snag list across the whole weekend, the better the results tend to be – and Japan had a very small snag list indeed.

Delivering performance through upgrades

The second half of a back-to-back is always hectic, with the race team having to do jobs in the garage that would be easier at the factory. Oscar’s crew were particularly busy, fitting a new suite of upgrades to his MCL60, and playing one of the team’s curfew joker cards on Thursday to work deep into the night.

Thankfully, the garages at Suzuka are cavernous, and everyone’s life is made a little easier when there’s room to spread out.

The result in Singapore was very good – but the team expected to do better in Japan. Having both cars running in the latest spec was obviously advantageous, but more than that, the high-speed, high-downforce nature of Suzuka was going to suit the characteristics of the MCL60. The team were buoyed by the fact that the car had run well at Silverstone, and that’s a good bellwether for Suzuka, especially with further improvements installed.

Focusing on tyre degradation in practice

Singapore isn’t a great circuit for detailed aerodynamic investigation: the track is too bumpy, the walls too close, and thus, despite solid sessions at Marina Bay, the team had a lot of questions still to answer about the new package. Therefore, the cars rarely left the garage without the tell-tale bright green flo-vis oil covering some part of the bodywork (and the crew, and the floor, and the driver).

The main task for practice was, however, understanding the tyres. The grand prix was expected to be a multi-stop affair – but how many stops and on which tyres was something to be investigated.

The early runs demonstrated that the track seemed to have higher degradation than usual, and how teams dealt with this would end up playing a pivotal role in the outcome of the race. We decided not to run the Hard tyre in practice, saving both sets for the race. This was a popular choice but by no means universal: Red Bull and Ferrari went the other way, with one Hard and two Medium (three, in the case of Verstappen). It guaranteed slightly different strategies on race day.

Before then, however, there was a lot of running to do in practice. This was helped – or hindered, depending on your point of view - by the teams having two sets of experimental 2024 tyres added to their allocation. We chose to use all of ours in FP1, which disrupted the normal shape of the session, as the garage was constantly on the clock, rushing through set-up changes in an effort to cram in two extra stints.

It barely left time to use the Soft tyre at all – but given that one set of those would be handed back after the session, used or not, both drivers managed to cram in a single push lap at the very end of the hour. It left Lando in P3 and Oscar P7. The second practice session was much the same, albeit with only the standard tyres, Lando finishing P3 and Oscar P8.

Having run a different spec of rear wing on Friday, the two cars combined for FP3, mostly using the set-up Lando had operated the previous day. The experiment that held the team’s interest in FP3 was discovering how to get the best out of a used Soft tyre on a single-lap qualifying run.

The high-deg nature of Suzuka meant the Soft tyre was well past its best after a single flying lap – but having decided a two-stop race on the Medium and Hard tyres was required, the team knew it would only have three sets of new Soft tyres to get through Q1 and Q2 and another available if they made it to Q3. There was, therefore, likely to be a run on a used Soft tyre at some point. The two cars finished the session P2 and P3, behind Verstappen but a considerable distance ahead of the chasing pack. This, it turned out, was a highly representative depiction.

There was even more pace to find in qualifying

The way qualifying played out, neither driver made a used tyre run, with both getting through Q1 and Q2 on a single timed lap, leaving them with two new sets of tyres for Q3.

There was a little bit of drama in Q2 when Oscar left the garage for a second run, but then pulled out of the fast lane and switched the engine off. As his mechanics ran down with dollies and recovered the car to the garage, it may have initially looked like a mistake, but in reality, it was based on the discovery that he was already safely through and needn’t go back out, with the team seeing which cars hadn’t left the garages.

The drivers did enough in Q3 to line-up P2 and P3 for the race, though neither thought they extracted everything from their final run. Oddly, seeing Verstappen nearly seven-tenths up was reassuring as they knew there wasn’t anything like that much time on the table for us to have gained.

A race of tyre preservation

The race itself was incredibly busy for the first half, and static (for us) through the second. Both drivers made a good start and were menacing Verstappen into Turn 1. The Dutchman covered Oscar, which appeared to give Lando a chance around the outside – but he couldn’t quite get on level terms and didn’t want to risk too much, so slotted into P2.

Further back, cars weren’t quite so cautious, and an early Safety Car was required. After the restart, it became a tyre management run. Oscar concentrated on preserving his rubber and staying ahead of Charles Leclerc, rather than chasing after Lando. He was, however, one of the earliest Medium-tyre starters to pit for Hards.

That might have punished him when there was a short-lived Virtual Safety Car soon after – but instead, it impacted Lando, who was stuck behind a slow-moving Sergio Pérez and, under the VSC rules, wary of passing. He saw his comfortable cushion evaporate, and a six-second gap to Leclerc became one second. Leclerc attempted the undercut, but Lando followed him in a lap later and remained in front – although, he had dropped behind Oscar.

The smart switch

On many tracks, a six-lap difference between stops wouldn’t constitute a different strategy, especially on a Hard tyre – but with the high-deg at Suzuka, it gave Lando a significant pace delta over Oscar.

The team decided to have the cars switch position, and Lando’s advantage allowed him to pull away from Oscar, who had enough in the tank to defend from behind. They both made their second stops in the main sequence and had to pass a one-stopping George Russell, but once that was completed, they were able to run to the flag in clean air, sealing second and third.

If Singapore was as tense a finish as you’re likely to see, this one was almost… serene.