Having introduced a significant raft of upgrades in Singapore, it soon became clear that not only were they not a step forward, they were actually compromising the team's performance, and as a result it was decided to drop them.

No sooner had they been dropped than Kimi Raikkonen was standing atop the podium in Austin, with the Finn joined by teammate Sebastian Vettel on the podium in Mexico a week later.

As the Italian team continues to try the upgrades, running the new floor again only yesterday, Head of Race Activities, Jock Clear, admits it was a brave decision to drop the upgrades in the first place.

"Over the course of this season, we haven't quite got it spot on at every race," admits the Briton. "The positive is we understand why.

"Those couple of races where we did have a slump, we came back in Austin, we were brave enough to go back on some of the development, and that's the kind of culture that we want to have now. That people are brave enough to say "OK, I think we've made a mistake".

"We go back, we relearn what we thought we understood, and we come back in Austin and we win the race, and we were competitive again in Mexico. So that's the positive to it.

"We brought pretty much an aerodynamic upgrade to every race this year," he continued, "so we have various options open to us, depending on the circuit to circuit, we try and find the best combination.

"The positive is that we are producing these options, that the wind tunnel is continuing to produce effectively tools for us to use from race to race and that's our job as race engineers on the operational side, is to make the most of the bits we've been given and that's the process. For example, you've seen in FP1, we'll do a comparison between two floors, two front wings, bargeboards, those sort of things and then from then on, we'll decide which combination is giving us the best performance for this track. And that's just a normal process for us."

Check out our Saturday gallery from Interlagos, here.