“It is about consistency this year,” Hamilton said. “We got a win and 25 points and I only have a 2-point lead. So it’s incredible how close it is and I think it will stay that close throughout the year. Again, it just highlights how important consistency is.”

But most team directors say that equally important is getting the tire game right as often as possible.

Regarding tires, McLaren Mercedes’s Neale said that the team considered “the interaction between track temperature, the vehicle dynamics of the car, the driving style, the ability of cars.”

“We’ve seen at different circuits different people have been able to switch the tires on very quickly and others take much longer to warm up,” he added. “We’re all chasing the same thing, which is the first team to become consistent and get them in the sweet spot.”

Getting there, said Graeme Lowden, a director of the Marussia team, will come down to more than just raw technical know-how, however.

“It takes an awful lot of technical knowledge,” he said, adding that it also took “intuition, as well as all of that data. You can be swamped with data and go down blind alleys. I think what we’re seeing now is all the teams are presented with exactly the same problem, and this is what this team sport is all about: who can solve it with the resources that they have and come out on top on Sunday, on race day.”