After another emotionally draining 71 laps, he switched to full persecution complex mode. The situation, Wolff claimed, was “against us”. “Lewis has felt this all his life,” he said. “Now we feel it, too. We are not going to take being victims.” It was, in truth, rather difficult to swallow, this notion that Mercedes, winners of seven consecutive drivers’ and constructors’ titles, were somehow the casualties of some dastardly FIA conspiracy. But evidently they intend to use it as powerful psychological fuel for the three races that remain.

In truth, they may not need this gloves-off attitude to secure an eighth championship double. From being second best, their car looks invincible once more, the advantage in straight-line speed so glaring that even Verstappen, the most committed defender of track position in the business, proved powerless to resist the swarming Hamilton in his mirrors. The fact that the season concludes at a trio of circuits with long straights – including two, in Qatar and Saudi Arabia, never visited by F1 before – suggests that Hamilton’s supremacy in Sao Paulo represented less an aberration than a telling shift in momentum. The one caveat in a stellar drive is the one issue that Red Bull urgently want resolved: how on earth did Mercedes do it?