Pressure is a funny thing. Some thrive under it, others fold. The Japanese Grand Prix laid bare the difference between a secure Mercedes team on the brink of yet another world championship double and an insecure Ferrari squad seemingly intent on self-sabotage.
Lewis Hamilton's accomplished victory, taking pole position, leading every lap and only being denied a 'grand slam' by Sebastian Vettel's pace on the penultimate lap, was immaculate.
But for Vettel, fastest lap was the most feeble of consolation prizes as he finished sixth at the end of a weekend of mishaps both for himself and Ferrari.
While Mercedes cruised serenely towards its inevitable front-low lockout and one-two, Ferrari struggled. The pace was not there, and the extraordinary decision to send both Vettel and Kimi Raikkonen out on intermediate rubber at the start of Q3 - on a dry track - was a big mistake.
Team principal Maurizio Arrivabene heavily criticised his squad for that, and it was a mistake compounded by Vettel going off at Spoon Curve on what was his only Q3 shot before the rain.
Even Raikkonen got in on the act, kissing the kerb on entry to the same corner and catching a moment, costing him third on the grid to Red Bull's Max Verstappen.
As Mercedes appears to have fallen back on its tried and tested processes to get the best out of itself, Ferrari has become increasingly 'grabby'.
Ferrari's alarming slump in pace relative to Mercedes over the past three race weekends is one thing, but the attempts to compensate for it with needless gambles speaks of a team ill at ease with itself.
That punt in qualifying was followed by supersoft-shod Vettel becoming over-eager in the race after storming from eighth on the grid to fourth on the first lap.
Brendon Hartley's wheelspinning start meant Vettel jinked to the right on the run to the first corner having immediately taken seventh, before dispatching the other Toro Rosso of Pierre Gasly through the Turn 2 right-hander. He then squeezed past the compliant Romain Grosjean's Haas through the right-hand kink before the hairpin.
Verstappen's mistake at the end of the first lap handed Vettel his fourth place. Running ahead of Raikkonen, Verstappen locked up and took to the grass at the chicane, rejoining as Raikkonen justifiably attempted to go around the corner while keeping out of the Red Bull's way.
Light contact was made and Raikkonen was forced briefly off the track, allowing Vettel to nab the position. It also earned Verstappen a five-second penalty for rejoining the circuit in an irresponsible manner.
"As soon as he realises somebody is close or next to him, he tries to push when you shouldn't push anymore"Sebastian Vettel on Max Verstappen
"I braked a little bit too late into the chicane, so I did everything I could to get back onto the track," said Verstappen. "And I think I did it in a safe way, because I was not crazy-fast onto the track.
"But Kimi chose the wrong line in the chicane. He could have also just waited for me to come back on the track. We touched a little bit, but I think it's really ridiculous, those five seconds."
Raikkonen, who picked up a little damage in the collision and struggled for the rest of the race, avoided getting too het-up about the incident.
"I tried to go outside and leave as much as I could," said Raikkonen. "But he obviously came kind of off the track over the grass kerb part so maybe could not turn more, and maybe he just ended up there. In an ideal world, he should have left a bit more.
"We lost quite a lot of downforce, but there's not much you can do after that because it is quite a sensitive area where you got hit. And after that, it was pretty difficult."
The safety car, deployed on lap four, allowed Vettel to get his breath back. The caution was to sweep up the shards the Haas of Kevin Magnussen had scattered around the track, particularly at the exit of Spoon Curve as he toured round with his a flailing left-rear Pirelli.
Charles Leclerc had hit the rear of the Haas while the pair disputed 12th place at the start of lap two when Magnussen darted to his right at the same time as the Sauber moved to pass him.
"He is, and will always be, stupid - it's a fact," said Leclerc over the radio. The stewards took no action because the pair moved right simultaneously, but it was easy to sympathise with Leclerc.
Vettel looked like he might threaten Verstappen at the restart at the end of lap seven, but got a rear-end wobble on the power coming out of the final chicane.
He then saw his chance when Verstappen's engine briefly de-rated due to a lack of battery power for the 160bhp MGU-K to deploy fully on lap eight.
Vettel jinked to the inside in an attempt to pass Verstappen at Spoon. He was absolutely justified in doing so, even though Verstappen inevitably gave him little room.
But what Vettel misjudged was the level of grip available and he understeered just enough to lock wheels with Verstappen.
Both cars picked up some minor damage, but while Verstappen kept going and rejoined from the run-off just in time to cut in front of Raikkonen and hold third, Vettel spun to the back of the field with 17 cars between him and his title rival.
"The gap was there but as soon as he saw me obviously he defended," said Vettel. "But I had the inside. As soon as he realises somebody is close or next to him, he tries to - in my opinion - push when you shouldn't push anymore.
"Look at [the incident with] Kimi - [Verstappen]'s off the track and he comes back, and if Kimi just drives on they'd collide. But it's not always right that the other guy has to move. We're all racing."
Verstappen, not to mention the stewards who considered this to be a racing incident after investigating, did not agree. He suggested it was similar to the clash in April's Chinese GP when roles were reversed and Verstappen clattered into Vettel with a misjudged move at the hairpin.
Hamilton was pulling his usual trick of disguising virtuosity as tedium
The stewards' verdict was that neither was wholly or predominantly at fault, which is reasonable, although Verstappen's annoyance was entirely understandable.
"I thought it was a bit like China this year with me," said Verstappen. "He could have easily gone past me on the straight one lap later or so. But then you see that even the most experienced drivers make mistakes here."
The upshot was Vettel was no longer a podium threat. Hamilton, meanwhile, was pulling his usual trick of disguising virtuosity as tedium on a weekend that seemed so simple for him, and avoiding any such scrapes.
After taking pole, and, along with his team-mate, earning the right to start on softs having used the compound to set his Q2 time, he could barely contain himself and told anyone who would listen what a great time he was having behind the wheel of the Mercedes W09. And who could blame him?
After a perfect qualifying came a good start, with Hamilton comfortably holding the lead while Valtteri Bottas slotted into second place. The lead was 1.341 seconds by the end of the lap, with Verstappen already another 2.6s behind Bottas.
Hamilton timed the restart well, gunning it as he completed a tyre-warm weave on the approach to 130R at the end of the back straight, immediately establishing a 1.3s lead over Bottas. That became 2.2s next time round, then 2.6s as he asserted his authority.
Hamilton was just over 5.8s clear when Bottas dived into the pits at the end of lap 23 of 53. Although usual procedure is for the leader to have priority, Hamilton had a big enough gap to be safe from the undercut to let Bottas go first even though there wasn't, at that stage, any big threat from behind.
Verstappen had pitted from third two laps before Bottas, by which time he had slipped almost 10s behind the Finn, with the gap once both had stopped at 9.5s.
Up front, Hamilton was able to make his stop to switch to mediums and emerge with a lead reduced to 4.4s. The top three broadly held station in the ensuing laps, until Bottas, also on mediums, started losing ground on lap 28.
At the start of that lap, he had 10.2s over soft-shod Verstappen, but over the following 12 laps the gap closed to nothing. On the final two of those laps, Verstappen was over a second faster, and soon piling on the pressure.
Bottas held firm and Verstappen never quite managed to launch an attack, but the Finn did make an error and cut the chicane during the pursuit.
Verstappen, carrying a little floor damage from his earlier Ferrari clashes, had one final push on the last lap, but locked up at the hairpin and ran deep, extinguishing what was already the faintest hope of making a move.
"Initially during the race, everything felt good, I knew what I had to do and I was really just executing the plan," said Bottas. "The pace felt good. But at the end of the second stint I had some blistering, which made it a bit more tricky, but anyway, for me the job was to get to the finish line in P2."
Surprisingly, it was Daniel Ricciardo rather than Raikkonen who rounded out the top four. Ricciardo started 15th after a throttle actuator failure early in Q2, but made short work of clearing the midfield. He did so by the chicane on lap 13, passing Grosjean for fifth, and then set about closing on Raikkonen.
Ricciardo brought the gap down from 7.7s to 4.2s when Raikkonen inexplicably peeled into the pits to take on medium Pirellis at the end of lap 17.
This was a puzzling strategic error by Ferrari, and it's unclear whether it was a serious attempt to undercut ahead of Verstappen, who was by this stage over six seconds up the road but still in range thanks to the five-second penalty he had to serve at his stop, or a consequence of the fear of Ricciardo closing.
Either way, it left Raikkonen mired in traffic. With Verstappen running to the end of lap 21 before pitting to take on softs, the time lost meant there was no chance for Raikkonen to take third, even with the Verstappen's penalty.
Ricciardo, meanwhile, was able to run to lap 23 and stop for mediums and emerge ahead of Raikkonen. Ricciardo did have a tyre-range advantage in that first stint over Raikkonen thanks to starting on softs, and was quicker, but it was strange that Ferrari made it so easy for Red Bull to jump him.
Vettel was making his recovery to sixth while this was going on. None of the midfield drivers showed any inclination to put up much of a fight, save perhaps for a fleeting flash of futile belligerence from Fernando Alonso, as Vettel spent much of the afternoon overtaking sundry 'Class B' runners - some of them twice as he had to make his pitstop for softs at half-distance.
Making 20-odd passes in the race was of little solace given Vettel's sixth place means Hamilton could clinch the world championship with three races to spare at Austin in two weeks.
But that's just a question of mathematics, as realistically we all know this title was lost before the teams even got to Suzuka. The instability at Ferrari, in stark contrast to the serenity at Mercedes, is proof of that.
There's no question the Mercedes is now the quicker car. Ferrari has reason to be disappointed with that and the apparent loss of some of its power advantage has led to all sorts of rumours, but what reflects badly on the team is that it has started making too many errors.
One of the first rules of winning a championship is you need to do the best you can on any given day. In qualifying, Ferrari's intermediate tyre gamble was motivated by a refusal to accept third and fourth. If you can be third, be third - don't throw it away in a vainglorious attempt to change the inevitable.
Ferrari would have looked heroic had the gamble paid off, certainly, but the fact remains that the other eight cars in Q3 all played the conditions in front of them and went for slicks. You could say it's ambition, but Arrivabene's reaction to the blunder is evidence of a team in which the pressure has got to the personnel - perhaps the leadership in particular.
Hamilton, meanwhile, can barely believe what is happening. Just over a month ago, this was one of the fiercest drivers' championship battles in history, with the lead having changed hands five times and Hamilton only ahead thanks to wet weather virtuosity in Germany and Hungary, and a few costly errors from Vettel.
Now, he's got one hand and four fingers of the other on the championship.
Pressure is a funny thing. Some thrive under it, others fold. The Japanese Grand Prix laid bare the difference between a secure Mercedes team on the brink of yet another world championship double and an insecure Ferrari squad seemingly intent on self-sabotage.
Lewis Hamilton's accomplished victory, taking pole position, leading every lap and only being denied a 'grand slam' by Sebastian Vettel's pace on the penultimate lap, was immaculate.
But for Vettel, fastest lap was the most feeble of consolation prizes as he finished sixth at the end of a weekend of mishaps both for himself and Ferrari.
While Mercedes cruised serenely towards its inevitable front-low lockout and one-two, Ferrari struggled. The pace was not there, and the extraordinary decision to send both Vettel and Kimi Raikkonen out on intermediate rubber at the start of Q3 - on a dry track - was a big mistake.
Team principal Maurizio Arrivabene heavily criticised his squad for that, and it was a mistake compounded by Vettel going off at Spoon Curve on what was his only Q3 shot before the rain.
Even Raikkonen got in on the act, kissing the kerb on entry to the same corner and catching a moment, costing him third on the grid to Red Bull's Max Verstappen.
As Mercedes appears to have fallen back on its tried and tested processes to get the best out of itself, Ferrari has become increasingly 'grabby'.
Ferrari's alarming slump in pace relative to Mercedes over the past three race weekends is one thing, but the attempts to compensate for it with needless gambles speaks of a team ill at ease with itself.
That punt in qualifying was followed by supersoft-shod Vettel becoming over-eager in the race after storming from eighth on the grid to fourth on the first lap.
Brendon Hartley's wheelspinning start meant Vettel jinked to the right on the run to the first corner having immediately taken seventh, before dispatching the other Toro Rosso of Pierre Gasly through the Turn 2 right-hander. He then squeezed past the compliant Romain Grosjean's Haas through the right-hand kink before the hairpin.
Verstappen's mistake at the end of the first lap handed Vettel his fourth place. Running ahead of Raikkonen, Verstappen locked up and took to the grass at the chicane, rejoining as Raikkonen justifiably attempted to go around the corner while keeping out of the Red Bull's way.
Light contact was made and Raikkonen was forced briefly off the track, allowing Vettel to nab the position. It also earned Verstappen a five-second penalty for rejoining the circuit in an irresponsible manner.
"As soon as he realises somebody is close or next to him, he tries to push when you shouldn't push anymore"Sebastian Vettel on Max Verstappen
"I braked a little bit too late into the chicane, so I did everything I could to get back onto the track," said Verstappen. "And I think I did it in a safe way, because I was not crazy-fast onto the track.
"But Kimi chose the wrong line in the chicane. He could have also just waited for me to come back on the track. We touched a little bit, but I think it's really ridiculous, those five seconds."
Raikkonen, who picked up a little damage in the collision and struggled for the rest of the race, avoided getting too het-up about the incident.
"I tried to go outside and leave as much as I could," said Raikkonen. "But he obviously came kind of off the track over the grass kerb part so maybe could not turn more, and maybe he just ended up there. In an ideal world, he should have left a bit more.
"We lost quite a lot of downforce, but there's not much you can do after that because it is quite a sensitive area where you got hit. And after that, it was pretty difficult."
The safety car, deployed on lap four, allowed Vettel to get his breath back. The caution was to sweep up the shards the Haas of Kevin Magnussen had scattered around the track, particularly at the exit of Spoon Curve as he toured round with his a flailing left-rear Pirelli.
Charles Leclerc had hit the rear of the Haas while the pair disputed 12th place at the start of lap two when Magnussen darted to his right at the same time as the Sauber moved to pass him.
"He is, and will always be, stupid - it's a fact," said Leclerc over the radio. The stewards took no action because the pair moved right simultaneously, but it was easy to sympathise with Leclerc.
Vettel looked like he might threaten Verstappen at the restart at the end of lap seven, but got a rear-end wobble on the power coming out of the final chicane.
He then saw his chance when Verstappen's engine briefly de-rated due to a lack of battery power for the 160bhp MGU-K to deploy fully on lap eight.
Vettel jinked to the inside in an attempt to pass Verstappen at Spoon. He was absolutely justified in doing so, even though Verstappen inevitably gave him little room.
But what Vettel misjudged was the level of grip available and he understeered just enough to lock wheels with Verstappen.
Both cars picked up some minor damage, but while Verstappen kept going and rejoined from the run-off just in time to cut in front of Raikkonen and hold third, Vettel spun to the back of the field with 17 cars between him and his title rival.
"The gap was there but as soon as he saw me obviously he defended," said Vettel. "But I had the inside. As soon as he realises somebody is close or next to him, he tries to - in my opinion - push when you shouldn't push anymore.
"Look at [the incident with] Kimi - [Verstappen]'s off the track and he comes back, and if Kimi just drives on they'd collide. But it's not always right that the other guy has to move. We're all racing."
Verstappen, not to mention the stewards who considered this to be a racing incident after investigating, did not agree. He suggested it was similar to the clash in April's Chinese GP when roles were reversed and Verstappen clattered into Vettel with a misjudged move at the hairpin.
Hamilton was pulling his usual trick of disguising virtuosity as tedium
The stewards' verdict was that neither was wholly or predominantly at fault, which is reasonable, although Verstappen's annoyance was entirely understandable.
"I thought it was a bit like China this year with me," said Verstappen. "He could have easily gone past me on the straight one lap later or so. But then you see that even the most experienced drivers make mistakes here."
The upshot was Vettel was no longer a podium threat. Hamilton, meanwhile, was pulling his usual trick of disguising virtuosity as tedium on a weekend that seemed so simple for him, and avoiding any such scrapes.
After taking pole, and, along with his team-mate, earning the right to start on softs having used the compound to set his Q2 time, he could barely contain himself and told anyone who would listen what a great time he was having behind the wheel of the Mercedes W09. And who could blame him?
After a perfect qualifying came a good start, with Hamilton comfortably holding the lead while Valtteri Bottas slotted into second place. The lead was 1.341 seconds by the end of the lap, with Verstappen already another 2.6s behind Bottas.
Hamilton timed the restart well, gunning it as he completed a tyre-warm weave on the approach to 130R at the end of the back straight, immediately establishing a 1.3s lead over Bottas. That became 2.2s next time round, then 2.6s as he asserted his authority.
Hamilton was just over 5.8s clear when Bottas dived into the pits at the end of lap 23 of 53. Although usual procedure is for the leader to have priority, Hamilton had a big enough gap to be safe from the undercut to let Bottas go first even though there wasn't, at that stage, any big threat from behind.
Verstappen had pitted from third two laps before Bottas, by which time he had slipped almost 10s behind the Finn, with the gap once both had stopped at 9.5s.
Up front, Hamilton was able to make his stop to switch to mediums and emerge with a lead reduced to 4.4s. The top three broadly held station in the ensuing laps, until Bottas, also on mediums, started losing ground on lap 28.
At the start of that lap, he had 10.2s over soft-shod Verstappen, but over the following 12 laps the gap closed to nothing. On the final two of those laps, Verstappen was over a second faster, and soon piling on the pressure.
Bottas held firm and Verstappen never quite managed to launch an attack, but the Finn did make an error and cut the chicane during the pursuit.
Verstappen, carrying a little floor damage from his earlier Ferrari clashes, had one final push on the last lap, but locked up at the hairpin and ran deep, extinguishing what was already the faintest hope of making a move.
"Initially during the race, everything felt good, I knew what I had to do and I was really just executing the plan," said Bottas. "The pace felt good. But at the end of the second stint I had some blistering, which made it a bit more tricky, but anyway, for me the job was to get to the finish line in P2."
Surprisingly, it was Daniel Ricciardo rather than Raikkonen who rounded out the top four. Ricciardo started 15th after a throttle actuator failure early in Q2, but made short work of clearing the midfield. He did so by the chicane on lap 13, passing Grosjean for fifth, and then set about closing on Raikkonen.
Ricciardo brought the gap down from 7.7s to 4.2s when Raikkonen inexplicably peeled into the pits to take on medium Pirellis at the end of lap 17.
This was a puzzling strategic error by Ferrari, and it's unclear whether it was a serious attempt to undercut ahead of Verstappen, who was by this stage over six seconds up the road but still in range thanks to the five-second penalty he had to serve at his stop, or a consequence of the fear of Ricciardo closing.
Either way, it left Raikkonen mired in traffic. With Verstappen running to the end of lap 21 before pitting to take on softs, the time lost meant there was no chance for Raikkonen to take third, even with the Verstappen's penalty.
Ricciardo, meanwhile, was able to run to lap 23 and stop for mediums and emerge ahead of Raikkonen. Ricciardo did have a tyre-range advantage in that first stint over Raikkonen thanks to starting on softs, and was quicker, but it was strange that Ferrari made it so easy for Red Bull to jump him.
Vettel was making his recovery to sixth while this was going on. None of the midfield drivers showed any inclination to put up much of a fight, save perhaps for a fleeting flash of futile belligerence from Fernando Alonso, as Vettel spent much of the afternoon overtaking sundry 'Class B' runners - some of them twice as he had to make his pitstop for softs at half-distance.
Making 20-odd passes in the race was of little solace given Vettel's sixth place means Hamilton could clinch the world championship with three races to spare at Austin in two weeks.
But that's just a question of mathematics, as realistically we all know this title was lost before the teams even got to Suzuka. The instability at Ferrari, in stark contrast to the serenity at Mercedes, is proof of that.
There's no question the Mercedes is now the quicker car. Ferrari has reason to be disappointed with that and the apparent loss of some of its power advantage has led to all sorts of rumours, but what reflects badly on the team is that it has started making too many errors.
One of the first rules of winning a championship is you need to do the best you can on any given day. In qualifying, Ferrari's intermediate tyre gamble was motivated by a refusal to accept third and fourth. If you can be third, be third - don't throw it away in a vainglorious attempt to change the inevitable.
Ferrari would have looked heroic had the gamble paid off, certainly, but the fact remains that the other eight cars in Q3 all played the conditions in front of them and went for slicks. You could say it's ambition, but Arrivabene's reaction to the blunder is evidence of a team in which the pressure has got to the personnel - perhaps the leadership in particular.
Hamilton, meanwhile, can barely believe what is happening. Just over a month ago, this was one of the fiercest drivers' championship battles in history, with the lead having changed hands five times and Hamilton only ahead thanks to wet weather virtuosity in Germany and Hungary, and a few costly errors from Vettel.
Now, he's got one hand and four fingers of the other on the championship.
