Wolff reveals root of ‘1 in 10’ Russell strategy call
Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff has highlighted the significance
of his squad's “mathematicians” following George Russell's bold
one-stop strategy at the Belgian Grand Prix. Russell completed the
race by making just a single pit stop, changing from his medium
tyres to hards on lap 10 of the race. The Briton crossed the line
in first place and celebrated a third career victory – however
Russell was soon disqualified after his car was judged to be
underweight. While Russell was significant in making the call to
reach the end of the race on a one-stop strategy, Wolff hailed the
engineers for being able to correlate the decision. “I think we can
pick out singular events where the driver had the right idea in the
race,” Wolff told media including RacingNews365 . But there’s so
many machines running in the background, calculating tyre
degradations and pace of the others, plus a bunch of really clever
mathematicians and strategies that look at that. “So in my opinion,
nine out of 10 times it’s the data that gives you the direction and
we are a sport that needs to rely on the data. “But driver input is
always important and what we encourage is great communication
between the driver and the engineers that’s going to give better
data to the strategists. “It correlated because at a certain stage
we said here’s nothing more to lose here and George said ‘can we
make it a one-stop’ so then we knew.”
of his squad's “mathematicians” following George Russell's bold
one-stop strategy at the Belgian Grand Prix. Russell completed the
race by making just a single pit stop, changing from his medium
tyres to hards on lap 10 of the race. The Briton crossed the line
in first place and celebrated a third career victory – however
Russell was soon disqualified after his car was judged to be
underweight. While Russell was significant in making the call to
reach the end of the race on a one-stop strategy, Wolff hailed the
engineers for being able to correlate the decision. “I think we can
pick out singular events where the driver had the right idea in the
race,” Wolff told media including RacingNews365 . But there’s so
many machines running in the background, calculating tyre
degradations and pace of the others, plus a bunch of really clever
mathematicians and strategies that look at that. “So in my opinion,
nine out of 10 times it’s the data that gives you the direction and
we are a sport that needs to rely on the data. “But driver input is
always important and what we encourage is great communication
between the driver and the engineers that’s going to give better
data to the strategists. “It correlated because at a certain stage
we said here’s nothing more to lose here and George said ‘can we
make it a one-stop’ so then we knew.”
