In his attempt to correct the two consecutive defeats to teammate Nico Rosberg, Lewis Hamilton put barely a foot wrong all weekend, but the cruel gods of racing intervened.
Lewis Hamilton instead snatched bitter defeat from the jaws of certain victory – but even this confused metaphor is incomparable to the significance of the error that robbed him of a much-deserved win.
The trigger was the late safety car period brought about by a high-speed crash between Max Verstappen and Romain Grosjean at turn one.
The intermediate was mass panic on a Mercedes pit wall that had been lulled into complacency by the routine nature of the race that seemed certain to deliver yet another one-two finish.
The result was a miscalculated pit stop for fresh tyres despite little more than 10 laps remaining, resulting in the hitherto unchallenged race leader exiting the pit lane in third place, behind Rosberg and Sebastian Vettel.
The fallout was the crushing realisation that, despite a near flawless weekend performance, Lewis Hamilton would be walking away winless from his sixth consecutive Monaco Grand Prix.
“I’ve lost this race, haven’t I?” said an obviously downcast Hamilton from his cockpit as realisation sunk in.
Drivers hold Monte Carlo in special regard. Though it rarely produces thrilling races, the tight and twisty street circuit has remained almost entirely unchanged throughout the sport’s history.
The archaic layout means the race has come to represent a rite of passage for the F1 greats; it is an opportunity for drivers to measure themselves against history. Add your list to the name of Monaco winners and live forever.
Yet Lewis Hamilton has but a solitary victory here – in 2008, his title-winning season – and it took until this weekend to score pole on these hallowed roads.
That Ayrton Senna, the man on which Hamilton has modelled his F1 career, has a legacy rooted in his mastery of Monaco, including six wins, will not have escaped the 30-year-old.
It was a reminder of the harshest kind that Formula One is, in fact, a team sport, and the driver is just as likely to make a mistake in the car as his engineers are out of it.
As in all sports, the team wins together and, in Monaco, it lost together – or at least half of it did.
Schadenfreude has a certain ring to it when pronounced in its native German, and Rosberg felt it in great doses when his own team accidentally delivered a win into his hands to make him the first triple-winner of Monaco since Michael Schumacher.
But it is unfair to begrudge him of his victory – human error cost him, too, on Saturday after a series of minor lock-ups ruined qualifying for him and his team.
Unable to exert any kind of race influence from second place, Rosberg did the next best thing: he put himself in the right place at the right time, and he reaped the scarcely believable rewards.
And for the temporary sense of injustice the Formula One bubbles feels for Lewis Hamilton, it is similarly undeniable that the result, which slashed Hamilton’s championship lead over Rosberg to just 10 points, has enlivened the season.
There really is no race like Monaco. As unlikely as it is to deliver 90 minutes of wheel-to-wheel racing, Formula One invariably leaves the principality with something to ponder.