In the end it was pretty straightforward for Lando Norris and McLaren to win the race and the constructors' title respectively on Sunday in Abu Dhabi. Even with the other McLaren of Oscar Piastri being spun out of contention in the opening seconds after contact with Max Verstappen.
But it wasn't always that way.
A further early lap incident - hitting Franco Colapinto - for Piastri after rejoining at the back, for which he received a penalty, meant Norris didn’t ever have a rear gunner to aid his task, as Carlos Sainz tracked him.
But Norris didn’t need one, as it turned out. He always had enough of an edge to keep the Ferrari out of range, an advantage which only increased in the second stint as most traded their mediums for hards. But there were a few tense moments, not least when Norris was struggling in dirty air when lapping backmarkers with eight laps to go.
If he’d run wide anywhere in those moments and Sainz had been able to capitalise from around 6s back, with Leclerc having driven a majestic race from 19th to third and Piastri not yet running in the points – that would have switched it: Ferrari would have stolen the constructors from under McLaren’s nose, unless Piastri could gave got himself up to ninth.
But the moment of stress passed, Norris found his way by, Sainz gave only distant chase, the Ferrari not working as well relative to the McLaren on the hards as on the mediums – and, though it wasn’t needed, Piastri did get himself into the points, with a 10th place.
It was a standard one-stop race of tension rather than excitement, though it was enlivened by the great recovery drives of Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton.
Norris’ start-to-finish victory was built upon his pole in a McLaren that was comfortably the fastest car around the Yas Marina track, its advantage particularly significant through the long Turn 9 which begins the final sector.
Ferrari was a little quicker at the end of the straights but Sainz never got close enough for that to matter.
George Russell’s Mercedes didn’t have quite the pace of Ferrari and was undercut by Leclerc at the stops despite having started 13 places ahead of him. Hamilton, on his offset tyre strategy starting on hards from 16th place on the grid, passed his team-mate around the outside of Turn 9 on the final lap and might’ve had a run at Leclerc if he’d had a couple more laps.
Max Verstappen’s Red Bull could probably have run around at this sort of level but his Turn 1 clash with Piastri - and the resulting 10-second penalty - left him staging a recovery drive to sixth instead.
He saw a gap to Piastri’s inside as they headed into Turn 1 off the startline but committed to it too late, believing in error that Piastri had seen him. He afterwards sought out Piastri to apologise. The Red Bull overheated its fronts when on the mediums, forcing him to be untypically conservative on the brakes.
Norris drove a race of technical perfection, McLaren delivered a superb 2s pitstop under the highest of pressure with its first constructors' championship in 26 years depending upon it.
Those in papaya began their wild celebrations as Norris delivered the team’s sixth victory of the year. That’s fewer than Verstappen’s single-handed nine – but no-one was quibbling.
We’ll never know how it might’ve gone down if Leclerc’s battery hadn’t failed in FP1 and given him that 10-place grid drop and if he hadn’t lost his Q2 lap to a track limits violation.
With a twin-Ferrari cut and thrust to pressure Norris up front, maybe the bells would’ve been ringing in Maranello tonight.
But we’d have been denied Leclerc’s sensational opening lap.
He went straight past Alex Albon and the almost-stalled Yuki Tsunoda off the grid, inside the debuting Alpine of Jack Doohan into Turn 1, taking advantage of the crashing Verstappen/Piastri and the avoiding Sauber of Zhou Guanyu through that turn, around the outside of the hard-tyred Hamilton through the fast Turn 4, then pinning-in Lance Stroll on the approach to the hairpin and passing around the outside.
Seeing the desperate four-car dice on the left-hand side of the track between Perez, Magnussen Bottas and Lawson as they raced up to the chicane, he moved hard right and braked late – three more places. A total of 11 places in six corners.
Norris looked up at one of the big screens as he screamed by in the lead at the end of the lap, already 1.8s clear of Sainz, and was somewhat discouraged to see Leclerc in eighth already.
From there Leclerc steadily picked off Magnussen, Alonso and Hulkenberg and closed in on Russell. He undercut his way past the Mercedes by pitting six laps earlier, and quickly overtook the over-delivering Alpine of Pierre Gasly, who’d run an initial third and had held off Russell for all of his short first stint, to be running a distant third to Sainz.
Gasly was inevitably later passed by the also-recovering faster cars of Hamilton and Verstappen but his seventh place, always just out of reach of Hulkenberg’s Haas, secured Alpine sixth in the constructors over Haas.
That outcome may have been inverted had Hulk not taken a three-place grid penalty from his excellent fourth-fastest time in qualifying – for overtaking on the exit of the pitlane, which is specifically prohibited here because of the potential for blockage.
Sainz’s last race for Ferrari was a typically resolute one, but the car just didn’t quite have the McLaren’s pace around here.
Hamilton was the fastest car on track in his last race for Mercedes once he’d switched to mediums and almost everyone else was on hards. He’d been happier with the car than Russell all weekend and with a tyre advantage he rejoined from his late first stop with 24 laps to go and a deficit of 17s to Russell. He took him on the last lap for a dramatic fourth and only around 4s shy of Leclerc.
Perez’s final race for Red Bull ended at the chicane on the opening lap as Valtteri Bottas, squeezed into the kerb, bounced into him, but Checo was reporting that there was already what felt like a gearbox problem.
Magnussen - in what was his final grand prix for now - had dived down his inside as the Red Bull had stuttered. K-Mag was then making good progress until he was assaulted on his out-lap by Bottas, who had over-committed on the brakes into the chicane.
Stopping for repairs, his race effectively over, Magnussen took a set of softs on which to set the fastest lap, then another set near the end to improve on his earlier benchmark. At least he took that with him on his last appearance.
The Haas was super-quick this weekend but Gasly was error-free and quick for Alpine - and that proved decisive. Fernando Alonso hauled the Aston around to ninth, just clear of the recovering Piastri at the flag.
McLaren was five seconds off the pace when Andrea Stella joined in 2015. He’s been there through its transformation and through his own evolution. He’s now presided as team principal for a world title-winning team. The achievement may even have buried the ghost of his nightmare of the 2010 title decider as Fernando Alonso’s race engineer at Ferrari.
As the McLaren has grown in stature, so has Norris, who was keen to point out that he spurned opportunities to leave here for a team which would have surely given him race wins and success much earlier.
“Lando showed his strengths delivering a perfect weekend,” says Stella, “and a perfect race when all the pressure was on him and he stayed very calm on the radio.
"He considered some difficult options that we gave him like when we said would you pit in case of safety car or not for a new set. So, I think we saw Lando at his best and his best is just incredibly competitive.
"I can't wait to see Lando and Oscar in the future with a competitive car right from race one.”