In the Las Vegas night, against the background noise of American pensioners drip-feeding their life savings into the slot machines quarter by quarter, Lando Norris cashed in the experience gained through his early-season struggles to hit the jackpot at the crucial moment.
That's McLaren team principal Andrea Stella's view – well, perhaps not of the shovelling of small change into grasping engines of late capitalism, but certainly of a driver developing strong momentum at a crucial time. There was a time in the opening phase of this season, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia being cases in point, where Norris could almost be counted upon to fluff his lines in Q3.
Around the slippery asphalt of Las Vegas, a dislikeable circuit rendered all the more beastly by the onset of rain before qualifying, Norris wasn't quite perfect but he delivered a lap clean and quick enough for pole on an evening where a seven-time champion could do no better than 20th. And all this at a venue where McLaren has struggled for the past two seasons and was not expected to shine.
Indeed, last year's winner George Russell had set the pace in his Mercedes throughout the weekend until his power steering failed him in Q3. But as Kenny Rogers memorably warbled, you never count your money while you're sitting at the table.
"I think what we see with the performance Lando has been able to consistently pull off over the recent races," said Stella, "I would call it capitalisation of some important pieces of information that we gained in the first part of the season, in which for Lando not always has been possible to realise the full potential that he had available.
"This is mainly credit to Lando himself, that he really put a special effort in trying to understand what is the learning from the various aspects which are relevant for a Formula 1 driver. They can be technical, they can be approach to the event, there can be some aspects of how you approach a session, together with your engineers, and this has been what we call a holistic approach."
