On Lando’s in-lap after the chequered flag, his race engineer Will Joseph saluted the Mexico City Grand Prix as “one of our best-ever races”. Lando shared the sentiment in his post-race comments, and then Team Principal Andrea Stella doubled down in his, adding: “not only was it one of his best races, but also one of the best races I have been part of.”

Given Andrea’s storied history in the sport and long association with Michael Schumacher, Kimi Räikkönen and Fernando Alonso, that statement carries weight… So, what did Lando and the team do that was so good?

Before heading to Mexico, McLaren had taken six podium finishes over the previous four grands prix, and collected a victory in the Qatar Sprint. Against this backdrop, fifth and eighth at the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez sounds like a fairly meagre return – but at the chequered flag in Mexico, the mood in the garage was elated. Not for the outcome but rather for the manner in which it was achieved.

While Oscar drove a gutsy race, dragging a damaged car to P8, Lando was the star of the show, scything his way through the field from P17 to P5.

It started, of course, with something not so good, as Lando was eliminated in Q1 for the first time since the Miami Grand Prix in May. His three attempts were stymied by a car issue, a driver mistake, and a yellow flag, and this left him starting from P17.

His strategy on Sunday had to be novel.

The car was competitive – the team just needed a way to make best use of that pace, but the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez isn’t particularly co-operative in that regard. The car has to follow very closely through the final corner, but that’s very difficult on a track that lacks grip.

Even when you can follow, the altitude makes it a fraught exercise. Cars are always at the cooling limit, but in the disrupted airflow, brake temperatures rocket and the PU and the tyre surface temperatures rapidly get out of control. So, no-one can afford to follow closely for long: it is a case of overtake quickly, or back-off, recover, try again.

The intent with Lando’s strategy was to run in clear air as much as possible… but have a significant tyre advantage when he did get into traffic.

“We knew that Lando would be a lot quicker than most of the cars ahead, so the idea was to start on the Soft tyre, hopefully make some gains on the first lap – which we did – and stop early to get into clear air,” explains Performance Engineer Henry Fidler, who was keeping a watching brief across both cars in Mexico.

“That allows you to really exploit the pace of the car. The other advantage, with temperatures being really difficult to manage here, is that, in clear air, you don’t have to manage as much and Lando could drive to his pace. That made his race more straightforward – but he drove very, very well.”

Lando was the only car to start on a Soft tyre, with the intention of making immediate inroads into his deficit. He passed Esteban Ocon and Fernando Alonso in the opening exchanges, but then got stuck behind Yuki Tsunoda.

Lando informed the team that he couldn’t get close enough through the final corner to make a move, and wanted to change it up. The team prepared to box him, but Tsunoda pitted first. Lando used the temperature budget he’d been carefully hoarding, put in two rapid laps, then pitted for the Hard tyre, emerging ahead of Tsunoda, in P18.

This was where the team wanted Lando to be. He had a clear track ahead, with a 17s gap to Ocon in P17. However, the team were more interested in the gap to Nico Hülkenberg in P8. The HAAS driver was 27s ahead, and the team were optimistic that Lando could undercut up to that position. That optimism was well-placed.

Some of Lando’s moves would, however, be done the old-fashioned way out on track, using the advantage of a faster car and a fresher tyre. Over the next 20 laps, he passed Ocon, Alonso, Lance Stroll, Valtteri Bottas and Alex Albon, while undercutting Guanyu Zhou, Logan Sargeant, Kevin Magnussen, Hülkenberg and Pierre Gasly. By Lap 31, he was P8.  

At this point, everyone barring Albon and Ocon had pitted, and the race looked like settling down… but then Magnussen crashed, causing a Safety Car. This posed a dilemma for the strategists. Normally, when recovering from the back, a Safety Car is useful, but this wasn’t the case for Lando. Quite the opposite, in fact, as it was very likely Lando would have to make another stop before the end.

The crash happened just before half-distance, and without the Safety Car, Lando would have kept pushing, and swapped to a Medium or Soft tyre for the final stint. This would have given him a significant pace delta over one-stopping cars…

On the other hand, a stop under the Safety Car was cheap, and he’d have a better tyre for the restart. Lando wasn’t convinced, and queried the instruction to box, but opted to come in for a new Medium. It was then that the universal law polite people ascribe to Murphy came into play: the Red Flag was thrown, and the whole garage groaned as they dashed out into the pit-lane.

“It was a little unfortunate,” says Henry. “We knew there was the risk of a Red Flag, given the severity of the crash – but we would have been in a difficult position whether we stopped or stayed out.

“Had the race continued under the Safety Car, we would have had the problem of restarting on an older Hard tyre in a bunched-up pack, and then having to box later in the race, dropping all the way back through that pack. We’ll review it as always to see if we could have done a better job of interpreting the situation, but the decision to pit felt like the most robust thing to do.”

Lando had dropped to P10 and then fell further at the restart, struggling to get away well on the dirty side of the grid, while also lifting to avoid an accident – he finished the lap back down in P14.

Were the team optimistic that he could still mount a charge towards the front? “No!” says Performance Engineer Andrew Jarvis.

“When he dropped back to P14, nobody in the team was confident it would come back to us like that,” he continues. “The car was tricky in following but Lando managed the tyre very well. If you look at the last stint, he was on top of what he was doing with the steering wheel, what the balance of the car was doing, and how he was switching his driving style according to whether he was following versus being in clear air. He did a very good job.”

Lando was stuck in P14 until Lap 41, but then the floodgates opened. He passed Bottas, Gasly, Ocon, Hülkenberg and Albon in short order – with the pass on Ocon being one for the ages. It left him back in P8… right behind Oscar.

Typically, at this point, Lando would ask the question, but instead, the team pre-empted it by asking Oscar to move aside. It was laid out simply to Oscar: his car had suffered damage, and he wasn’t catching Daniel Ricciardo, so the team wanted Lando to take a shot. Oscar didn’t need any cajoling and pulled aside, Lando said “thank you” and pushed on. He was P7 and, with 15 laps remaining, had Ricciardo and George Russell in his sights.

These were both genuine front-runners on pace and not going to make it easy. Lando’s task was to close the gap, while nursing his ageing Medium tyres and keeping temperatures under control.

Essentially, the contradictory request engineers hate asking of the driver: go fast but take it easy. It never makes the highlights reel, but Lando’s skill in doing that was more impressive on Sunday than any of his overtaking moves. Precise with the line, pinpoint on the brakes.

His move on Daniel was right out of the top drawer, braking early to carry more speed through Turn 4 on the outside line, which switched to the inside for Turn 5. Ricciardo, running an excellent race of his own, opted to not get the elbows out, leaving Lando just enough space to get by – and not a millimetre more.

With Russell being the final car Lando could realistically catch, Will Joseph advised patience: Lando took seven laps to cruise up behind the Mercedes, arriving in the DRS zone with tyres in good shape and the battery pack fully charged. Russell defended hard – but after going wheel-to-wheel, Lando emerged in front after the double-apex Turn 6.

He’d made 14 successful overtaking moves, undercut five more cars and accepted a freebie from Oscar. It was the opposite of a charge on the ragged edge, being a calculated, mature drive to keep the car cool, look after the tyres and extract the maximum from the MCL60 over the long haul.

Was it his best drive ever? You be the judge of that. It’s got plenty of competition, including some show-stopping turns in the wet, and plenty of races from back in his junior days. Post-race, Lando called it ‘very good’ – but was more curious about where he might have finished up, had qualifying not been disappointing. That thought is going to be occupying a lot of minds on the way to São Paulo today, where the Autódromo José Carlos Pace may provide an opportunity to find out.