Eventual race winner Max Verstappen, who once again showed how good his Red Bull RB19 is at looking after tyres, confessed to being into management mode as soon as he left the pits.
"The out-lap," said the Dutchman, when asked when he first started looking after his tyres. "There was not one lap where I pushed flat-out. You can't. It's impossible."
Following the race, a number of drivers admitted things had been pretty extreme in trying to keep the soft tyre alive for the 24-lap race event.
Williams driver Alex Albon even lamented: "The [degradation] is just massive. It feels terrible to drive, to be honest."
With the soft tyre being far from ideal, one logical assumption would have been that drivers had made an error in not going to the medium – which should in theory have offered better durability for a slight trade-off in ultimate performance.
But that option proved to be far from ideal for the three drivers who tried it – Nico Hulkenberg, Kevin Magnussen and Logan Sargeant – as they all failed to make an impression in the race and suffered just as bad with degradation.
The Brazil sprint therefore appears to have thrown up a scenario where teams and drivers were caught between a rock and a hard place: a soft that needed too much management and a medium that wasn't performing to its best.
Why the soft proved to be the preferred route for all the front-runners is a complex matter to understand, but F1 tyre supplier believes a number of circumstances came together.
Source: Autosport