“It’s crazy how long it takes here to dry,” said Sainz. “We keep doing laps, and you keep looking at the track and the dry line never appears in some places, and it keeps sliding a lot.”

“It’s difficult to spot the dry line on this circuit,” said Fernando Alonso who retired his Alpine from just behind Norris with PU failure. “I don’t know if it is the night running or just the asphalt, the new asphalt, the dark one, but it’s very difficult to spot the dry line.”

“Half the track was on the dry side but the other half was good for inters,” said Perez, “at the time we were on the slick. So not to make a mistake, and control Charles, who was really strong in the early phases, was tough.

“People, when they’re looking at you, underestimate how hard it is, and how easy it is for us to make a mistake. We basically were going to few places where it was properly damp, properly wet and it was super, super tricky, not to make a mistake.”

Into this challenge mix a sometimes-reluctant engine as it took occasional exception to the humidity of the place and the stress for Perez of delivering the much-needed result can be imagined.

Leclerc didn’t feel he or the team had done anything wrong. It had all been decided at the start, when the Ferrari caught a damper patch than the Red Bull. After that all he could do was pile on the pressure until the front tyres got too hot. “As I’ve said before this weekend, I want to use these last few races for us to get better on the execution of the race, especially,” he said, “and I feel like it’s a step forward this weekend. We need to do other steps forward. But it’s a good step in the right direction.”

Perez was able to use the Red Bull’s better tyre usage to pull out over 5sec on Leclerc near the end, as a precaution against a possible penalty for allowing the safety car to get too far ahead on the two restarts. A 5sec penalty was duly applied, insufficient to change the order thanks to Checo’s late charge and Leclerc’s fading front rubber.

Sainz’s third was a much better result than a performance. “I lost quite a bit the front and I was having a lot of moments, a lot of front locks, and every moment here costs you confidence and costs you the ability to recover that pace. At one point I had to settle a bit and recover that confidence because I couldn’t keep up and once the confidence recovered in the slick and towards the last 10-15 laps I managed to be quick. But it was just way too late.”

Norris was pushing him for a time, which for a McLaren was terrific. Team-mate Daniel Ricciardo’s fifth place owed much to McLaren keeping him out long enough to benefit from a very time-cheap stop under a safety car which leapfrogged him past many of those he’d otherwise have finished behind. Hamilton spent most of the first stint stuck behind Sainz, locked up and nosed into the barrier while trying to pass, dovetailed his change to slicks with a new front wing, caught the sixth/seventh place Aston Martins but couldn’t pass, was caught in turn by the recovering Verstappen, went wide trying for a pass on Sebastian Vettel, losing him a place to the Red Bull driver, who then passed Vettel too.

But amid the sparks and the spray it wasn’t about Verstappen or Hamilton for once. It was about a driver bouncing back from a confidence crisis.