Morning After: Mercedes lead but Vettel keeps it close

Just as it was in 2015 and 2017, so it might be in 2018: Lewis Hamilton is champion with several races still to go, and with it comes a chance at some sort of redemption for his rivals. Certainly, Friday at Interlagos did nothing to dissuade that notion.

An interesting quirk in Hamilton's otherwise stellar record, the Briton remains winless in five same-season races after being crowned world champion, and he'll be hard-pressed not to make it 0-6 with two particularly motivated drivers in Valtteri Bottas and Sebastian Vettel making this a three-way battle already.

Leading Hamilton by a miniscule (but not insignificant) 0.003s, Bottas seems poised to make his best attempt yet at regaining the win he "lost" in Russia, while Vettel – looking for his first victory since Belgium – is just 0.070s behind the Briton.

It's also worth noting that while Mercedes holds a slim out-right pace advantage (with more presumably to come), Vettel could be the one with the last laugh, given his fairly significant advantage on race simulations. Four-tenths faster than Bottas on comparable high-fuel supersoft runs (1:12.933 average to 1.13.333), and nearly five-tenths faster than Hamilton on low-fuel softs (1:12.732 average to 1:13.225), this race could get very interesting if the German is able to maintain even half of that gap – here's hoping.

Five. Grid-place penalty for Daniel Ricciardo, who was forced to take-on a sixth turbocharger after a Mexican marshal damaged his old one with extinguisher foam. You can't make this stuff up.

0.965s. Gap between P7 Romain Grosjean and P19 Brendon Hartley in the battle for best of the rest. Is it too much to ask for a 14-way fight for seventh?

Three. Instances of argy-bargy involving drivers on Friday – including Grosjean v Sainz, Norris v Stroll, and Stroll v Verstappen. Fire up, lads!

Forced to sit in the garage for most of FP2 with an oil leak, it should be interesting to see what Max Verstappen can do tomorrow. The Dutchman was absolutely rapid in FP1, and with only two races left to take the youngest pole-sitter award, you know he has the motivation.

Maybe it was inevitable once his buddy Felipe Massa left that Rob Smedley would follow him out the door at Williams, but it's interesting that he's already publicly looking for his next job on the grid. Reading between the lines, it seems more like he wanted to leave a situation unlikely to turn around any time soon.

Nice to see that despite these trying times, Seb Vettel still hasn't lost his sense of humour.