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.”