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McLaren Mercedes left no stone unturned in a multimillion-pound effort to provide Lewis Hamilton with the fastest and most reliable car possible for his title showdown against Felipe Massa, of Ferrari.

Hamilton and McLaren went into the Brazilian Grand Prix haunted by last year's debacle at this race, when his car suffered its only technical glitch of the season as the gearbox malfunctioned for 40 seconds on lap seven. Together with a rash move at the start of the race against Fernando Alonso, his team-mate at the time, this proved enough to end Hamilton's title hopes.

This time, the Woking-based team threw themselves into the most thorough pre-race preparation of a car in their history, in a two-week programme that started immediately after Hamilton's victory at the Chinese Grand Prix in Shanghai. The experts in the engineering department tested the reliability of every component on Hamilton's McLaren MP4/23 while developing modifications to its aerodynamic specification that the team believe improved its performance by one tenth of a second per lap.

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Ron Dennis, the team principal, speaking shortly before the race, said: “We used all the time since the Chinese Grand Prix to run every scenario that we could think of. We introduced all the problems that we imagined could occur and factored those in. Can we damage a nose? Can we stop? Can we change a nose and still come fifth? Every single part on the car has been reanalysed. We looked at the history over the last year of the reliability of each component and anything that fell close to being of concern.

“No more effort could have been put in than we put in. You can only do your best and if that isn't good enough, you've got to be able to look back and say, 'Is there any more we could have done?' And I can categorically say now we couldn't have done more.”

Neither Dennis nor McLaren were prepared to say how much the programme cost, but Dennis admitted that the improvement in performance of the car was the most expensive technical advance the team had ever made. This was taken to indicate a cost of £2-4 million for a team whose overall annual racing budget is at least £200 million.

“We threw everything at this race and to get that [extra performance] squeezed out after the intensity of our development programme has been a Herculean effort,” Dennis said. “We can't have made it faster, put more effort into making it reliable and we can't have put more effort into trying to accommodate anything that could happen in the race.”