This was apparently a very light payload, so there was lots of room for experimentation - attempts at recovering the fairings, and further speculation at playin

This was apparently a very light payload, so there was lots of room for experimentation - attempts at recovering the fairings, and further speculation at playing with the second stage, and just playing with tolerances and approach angles given sunk cost of the extra launch power. Us fans don't always get to see or hear about those early experiments though.