Race director, Michael Masi has explained why the stewards decision making process has appeared to take longer than usual in recent weeks.
At a time Netflix' Drive to Survive series is being credited with bringing a legion of new fans to the sport, it comes as no surprise that some recent events have appeared to play to the gallery.
Several weeks ago Max Verstappen said he is not taking part in the latest series because it paints a false picture of the sport, suggesting bitterness between drivers when there is none.
On the other hand there is clearly no love lost between certain team bosses, and while one can understand the rivalry between Toto Wolff and Christian Horner, it appeared somewhat staged when Sky Sports gave live coverage of their press conference on Friday, having dropped live coverage of the team principals press conferences a couple of years back.
As if the barbs and smears weren't enough drama for the cameras, bang on cue it was revealed that Mercedes request for a right of review of the incident at Interlagos a week earlier had been denied.
Then, on Sunday, having announced almost three hours after the end of qualifying that Max Verstappen was under investigation - as were Valtteri Bottas and Carlos Sainz - the stewards decision wasn't confirmed until ninety minutes before the start of the race.
Even more curious, whilst Verstappen met with the stewards before Bottas, it was the Dutchman's penalty that was revealed last... though without a drum roll.
Amidst claims that events are increasingly appearing to be 'stage managed', Michael Masi has defended the process.
"I think you need to remember that one of the things, and I'd say all of you around this table have asked for, is for more description in decisions rather than just saying 'this person is guilty' or 'this person is not guilty'," the Australian told members of the media after Sunday's race.
"You actually want as much of an understanding as possible of the process, such as if there were any other similar types of cases.
"The stewards try and write their decision, be that last weekend, this weekend, or any of them that sort of have a level of nuance to them, they put that level of detail into them, and it takes time, to draft, rewrite etc.
"We can have decisions, and that's one part," he continued. "The other part is the teams need to be given the opportunity to present their case.
"As an example, last weekend in Brazil, effectively in total over the two days, Mercedes was presenting to the stewards for about 2.5 hours, so you've got to put that into account as well along with sessions and everything else in between.
"I think sometimes the stewards would be happy to just write 'this person has breached the rules and end of story'," he added, "but then we'll go back a few years and most of you around this table have said you want more description.
"You've also got to think of offset time frames and everything else, such as when people are available and so forth."
Referring to the yellow flag infringements at the end of Q3, he said: "You look at where the cars were on track, go through and have a look at all of the footage of every single car in the top ten, which is what I did.
"Then you look at the data and so forth. Obviously it is time consuming, and you want to make sure of what you've all got, so once we've finally got to it, determined who had done what and what was displayed and what wasn't displayed and so forth we then reported those to the stewards and they sent out the summons."
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