*Interactive charts best viewed on desktop, pace from green flag racing laps only.

After having been closely challenged by the Mercedes pair, but particularly Antonelli, in the Sprint race, Norris and his team principal Andrea Stella were all too aware of the “very tight competition”.

On an individual level over the 24 laps on Saturday, Antonelli was Norris’ closest rival with pace just 0.074s off the McLaren driver on average and 0.164s quicker than his own teammate. As Norris said, he pushed him “all the way” and he went into the grand prix expecting the same challenge – especially with Antonelli alongside him on the front row again.

But the competition on race day for Norris came from a perhaps unexpected source given the pace he’d had and struggles he’d endured to that point of the weekend: Max Verstappen.

The woes Red Bull had faced with their RB21 over Saturday with “zero grip”, bouncing, and therefore an ultimate lack of pace had been resolved by their taking of a pit lane start for Verstappen – allowing for a total reset and a new power unit too.

Whatever changes were made put the RB21 back into its seemingly very narrow performance window and meant that, over the 71-lap grand prix, Verstappen’s pace was within just 0.036s of Norris’.

While the extra stop he took following a puncture on lap 7 could be inflating that, the carving through traffic he was doing versus Norris’ run in clean air for the majority of the race may counteract that effect. And if Verstappen was truly that closely matched to the championship leader, Norris’ comments about having work to do to regain the dominance he enjoyed in Mexico may be valid.

Immediately post-race he turned his attention to that, saying, “I’ll go back, see the team, congratulate them and see what we can do better.”

Intra-team battle continues?

Oscar Piastri has been someway off Norris results-wise for the last few races as he’s struggled to extract the pace from his MCL39 at the lower-grip circuits of Austin and Mexico City particularly. But that wasn’t the case this weekend in Brazil, even if the track was considered on the lower end of grip. Piastri was within 0.085s of his teammate for race pace over the grand prix, despite finishing P5 to Norris’ P1.

The pair ran, on paper, identical strategies but very different races in reality. While Norris was out front for most of it, Piastri was in the mix with the Ferrari of Leclerc and Mercedes pair and as a result of an incident at the VSC restart, earned a 10-second penalty from the stewards.

As Andrea Stella said, Oscar “paid dearly for the penalty” and Piastri himself branded the weekend “disappointing” as his teammate extended his lead over him in the standings to 24-points.

Mercedes best of the top four?

Owing to Ferrari’s incredibly tough day and Tsunoda’s delta to Verstappen, on a team-level, Mercedes emerged as McLaren’s closest and most consistent rivals in Brazil.

The combined pace of Antonelli and Russell was 0.168s slower than Norris and Piastri’s, but similarly to the Sprint, Antonelli emerged as the quicker driver of the pair with average pace 0.138s clear of Russell’s.

It paints a similar picture to the Sprint data, where they were split by 0.164s, and points to the struggles Russell was having “to find the necessary pace to really challenge at the front”, as he said post-race.

He lost out on the final podium place to Verstappen who ran the soft versus the mediums of Norris, Antonelli and Russell for a final stint. Combined with the clear compound difference, Russell said he was “having to manage brake temperatures at the end” which also “made it more difficult to fight Verstappen for P3.”

But that can’t take away from an incredibly strong weekend by Antonelli, both over single laps in the two qualifying sessions and to pick up P2 in both races too, as his pace reflects.

“Disappointing” for Ferrari

Following a second double DNF of the year, Ferrari moved down from P2 to P4 in the Constructors’ this weekend which Fred Vasseur said was “disappointing” – a sentiment echoed by both of his drivers too.

Leclerc’s early DNF at the VSC restart on just lap 6 and Hamilton’s damage early on that cost him a significant amount of downforce makes their pace over the grand prix very tough to read.

However, as Vasseur was keen to highlight, looking at the positives of the weekend reveals that they showed good race pace over the Sprint. They were just two teams with pace within one second of McLaren over those 24-laps, but that will likely make the grand prix outcome all the more painful as with Leclerc qualified in P3 it could have been used on Sunday to bring home a healthy points haul.

A midfield split by half a second

With the entire field’s race pace separated by just over 1.3 seconds and the midfield teams split by 0.551s from Haas who emerged as the quickest and Sauber (only Hulkenberg) as the slowest, the order was incredibly mixed up and the battles were thrilling and close to the very end. In fact, just 5.605s split Lawson in P7 from Stroll in P17 in the finishing result!

Ollie Bearman’s performance just two weeks on from his career-best P4 finish in Mexico was a highlight. He was quick all weekend on a track he’d only visited once prior when he filled in for an unwell Kevin Magnussen last season.

He finished P12 in the Sprint, but qualified P8 for the grand prix having set lap times that ran to the top of the timesheets throughout the hour session. Executing “the perfect race”, in Bearman’s words, on Sunday allowed him to finish in P6. They ran an aggressive two-stop to search for clean air to allow his maximum pace to show, which put Bearman as the sixth fastest driver for race pace (only 0.171s off Russell) and Haas as the quickest midfielders.

We also saw some real strategic variation in the midfield with Lawson at Racing Bulls and Hulkenberg at Sauber running monster stints on the mediums (and softs in Hulkenberg’s case) to hold onto the points positions they’d qualified in. It worked in both cases with careful management, as a consequence of the degradation being driven by wear rather than a thermal effect on a low grip track, but it does leave them as the two slowest drivers for race pace of those who finished.

Alongside those races of management, the Aston Martin pair rolled the dice on the hard tyre at the start which did not pay off as well. Though the cooler track temperatures aided those wanting to extend on the softer compounds, they meant the hard tyre suffered sliding and graining and was the least optimal of the three. As Fernando Alonso said, it was a risk that “didn’t pay off”.

Gasly was another driver who ran to the points in both races in Brazil, finishing P8 in the Sprint and P10 in the grand prix. While his pace was towards the slower end of the field, he felt “the car had more pace than we were able to show” owing to his track position. But as the team at the bottom of the Constructors’ and one who hadn’t scored a point since Belgium, adding two more to their total will boost morale over the final stage of what’s been the toughest season for team Enstone in a very long time.