It was an astonishing about-turn, but if Formula 1's three battling teams honestly believed Bernie Ecclestone's admission at Austin that the sport's funding crisis was "probably my fault" and that remedial action would be taken despite the 84-year-old admitting he had "no idea how to fix it", team bosses at Lotus, Force India and Sauber unsurprisingly received icy wake-up calls in Sao Paulo.
There, Ecclestone suggested the answer to their combined dilemmas lay in "spending less" - despite governance procedures and regulations for the costliest sport on Earth being totally skewed against independent operations, with three majors receiving the bulk of F1's billion pound annual revenues simply for fortnightly presenting themselves cars for scrutineering.
This was a far cry from Ecclestone's comments at Austin, where, in the wake of the administrations of Marussia and Caterham, he called on the privileged teams to make sacrifices by forfeiting portions of their earnings, with a doubling of the amount coming from 'his' side. Precisely who was onside went unmentioned...