"George Hendrick" Sprint Freestyle?

I swam in a meet last weekend. For some time I have been working on my freestyle timing and technique, and I think I've made progress. During warm-ups for the 50 free I felt really great--powerful, good acceleration, lots of potential energy. This swimming at maybe 90%. Then, in the race, I found myself hacking at the water--none of the same sense I'd had in warm-ups. Today, in a workout, I was able to replicate my meet time in the 50 at that same 90% pace I'd used in warmups. Pause for metaphor introduction: as a kid (and now, for that matter) I was a Cleveland Indians fan. They were uniformly terrible during the 60s, 70s, and 80s. But in the 70s they had an outfielder named George Hendrick, who was a gifted player. Hendrick had an ability to run while looking like he was jogging. He covered a lot of ground, and was quite fast, but he appeared to be dogging it. No strain was ever visible. He got a lot of grief in the press for being lazy, even though it was an optical illusion. He ran really fast but looked slow. So here's my question: is it possible that I should sprint at less than what feels like 100%, in order to get better efficiency and thus more speed? Or am I kidding myself, and I need to just learn to use a really fast tempo without overswimming?