Max Verstappen's victory in the Japanese Grand Prix owed an awful lot to the driving brilliance of the four-time Formula 1 champion.
His superb qualifying effort to grab an against-the-odds pole position, combined with an error-free run on Sunday, was critical to helping him head home the quicker McLaren cars.
But it would be wrong to conclude that Verstappen's triumph was down to him alone, because drivers cannot perform well at a track like Suzuka if they do not have a pretty decent car underneath them.
Yes, the Red Bull RB21 may be lacking compared to the McLaren, but Suzuka showed us some of its core strengths (and perhaps also confirmed its weakness).
It highlighted how good the car is in low-speed corners and traction zones, plus its excellence under braking and that its drivers can now attack the kerbs with it - something that was not easily possible with last year's RB20.
What Suzuka also strangely emphasised is that McLaren's core advantage remains in how it looks after its tyres.
Rewind to the Australian GP and those opening laps on the inters, and it showed that Verstappen and Red Bull can be every bit a match on pace to the McLarens.
However, what the RB21 cannot do as well as McLaren's MCL39 is look after its tyres over the long haul. This is why it fell off the cliff in Australia and struggled in China, and also explains why it was so much better off in Japan - because there was no tyre degradation to worry about.
Drivers were able to push closer to the ultimate pace of their cars. So, as McLaren admitted afterwards, this shifted things in favour of Red Bull because Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri could not exploit an advantage they have shown previously.
"Certainly I would have preferred old-style Suzuka before the resurfacing, because, in a situation like that, we would have exploited the good qualities of our car," said McLaren team boss Andrea Stella.
"But when the tyres behave so strong, we have no additional qualities because everyone has very low degradation."
Main headache not fixed
Despite the Japan victory and some strengths that were unlocked from Saturday morning onwards, Verstappen knows that Red Bull is not yet where it wants to be with its car.
In particular, the RB21 remains a handful with its through-corner balance - and it was only through changing a ton of stuff overnight from Friday into Saturday that Red Bull was able to get the car into the right window to allow Verstappen to do what he did.
Red Bull's key target over the winter was to widen the operating window of its 2025 car, after last year's RB20 proved to be hard to hit the sweet spot with.
After pre-season testing, the team felt that it had made progress in this area, but then came some messages from the early races that seemed to contradict this.
The now-dropped Liam Lawson struggled to get comfortable with it, as he complained about how narrow its sweet spot was.
"It's just a small window," he said. "It's hard. It’s hard to drive. It's hard to get it in that window."
There have also been numerous comments from Max Verstappen of the car being quite a handful on track and it perhaps being only the fourth-fastest car in F1. And Yuki Tsunoda admitted after Japan that he has finally begun to understand how tricky the car is when pushed to the limit.
But, as Red Bull chief engineer Paul Monaghan pointed out in Japan, it is important to distinguish between a car that is hard to drive at the limit, and one that has a narrow set-up window.
"It's easy to overstate that we've got a difficult car to drive," he said. "I bet they're all quite difficult.
"How twitchy your car is, or how nervous your car is, it's relative. I bet there are 18 other twitchy cars in this pitlane that all of us, myself probably the most, would find really quite difficult to drive. So you're trying to get your car as balanced as you can make it."
This nervousness is more a manifestation of the fact that Red Bull is behind main rival McLaren by around two tenths of a second, so it needs its drivers to push the extra yard to close that gap.
But this differentiation between the nervousness and the set-up window does not disguise the fact that the squad still does not have all the answers for some of its quirks.
And chief among them is nailing its through-corner balance.
There remain elements of a much talked about 'disconnect' between the front and rear axles that haunted Red Bull last year - where a car can enter a corner with oversteer but, as it transitions through it and prepares to exit, then suffers from understeer.
The team has found itself chasing its tail in trying to dial out both these characteristics. Get rid of the corner entry problem and it makes the exits worse; cure the understeer and the car is too much of a handful on the way in.
Red Bull also does not want to sacrifice too much of the fact that the car seems to be so good on the brakes - a factor that proved crucial at Suzuka where Verstappen nailing the final chicane ultimately won him pole.
More to come
The disconnect aero balance problems are not as bad as they were with the RB20, but senior figures suggest the squad has only made 25% of the progress that it wants to make on this front - so there is plenty of room for improvement.
As Verstappen said: "We know our limitations. So we just have to try and run against that limitation as much as we can.
"It's still not fixed. This is hopefully going to be fixed soon, but I cannot give you a timeline on that. It's just about trying to find that limit, which is really sensitive for us at the moment."
It's also important to put Red Bull's problems in context. Verstappen's outspoken remarks on the team radio often play up the drama of the car being much worse than it is. But Monaghan made it clear that the gains needed to get on top of McLaren are not that big.
"Last year's [car] had some flaws, and we've addressed those flaws quite well, without giving away much laptime, in my opinion," he said.
"Now we've got to try and get this one to be a little bit better. If we're two tenths off on a 5.5-kilometre circuit with 20-something corners, if we find a few hundredths in each corner, all of a sudden we're on the pace of the current lead car.
"We have just got to try and get a little bit more speed out of this one, try and improve its stability to the point that the drivers find it easier to drive.
"If we can do that and put some laptime onto it, all well and good. We'll be in the hunt."
What could turn the tables
But there is another fascinating element to the season that could yet prove to be Red Bull's ace up its sleeve in its bid to beat McLaren.
It is that Red Bull may not need to improve its car balance to get on par with its main rival; it could be that its rival comes back towards it.
That is because, as the flexi front wing clampdown coming for the Spanish Grand Prix gets closer, Red Bull is getting more and more convinced that its impact could be bigger than many suspect.
Because just as McLaren, Mercedes and Ferrari made major progress in improving the balance of their cars when they introduced flexi front wings last year, so too does that point to them perhaps falling out of the window when they have to strengthen their wings for Barcelona.
Red Bull is convinced that the change in Spain will shake things up at the front in F1, although it is impossible to tell right now which of the teams it will hurt the most and who will emerge as the big winner.
Making a firm prediction about who gains and who loses, and by how much, is impossible - but team principal Christian Horner said he senses an opportunity for his squad because it was well behind its rivals in playing around with flexi front wings.
"There's an unknown as to how it will affect the different cars," he said.
"You can see the operating window of these cars is very narrow and that front wing change is quite a significant one. It will be interesting to see how and who it affects.
"But there's no guarantees. We know areas of the car we need to improve. And the whole team is very focused on that.
"We know if we can unlock some of the potential on this car then it puts us right in the fight."
Red Bull's gameplan is clear though: hang on to the coattails of McLaren until Spain, and then hope that a stirring up of the order there brings some added momentum for it to push on with a full-scale title assault.
