Toto Wolff addresses Lewis Hamilton’s strategy frustration with clear verdict

Mercedes’ George Russell and Lewis Hamilton cross the line at the 2024 Belgian Grand Prix.

Although Lewis Hamilton was frustrated that he wasn’t given the option of a one-stop strategy at Spa, Toto Wolff says Mercedes “absolutely” did the “right thing” pitting him twice.

Hamilton won Sunday’s Belgian Grand Prix but it was a win he inherited when his Mercedes team-mate George Russell was disqualified for a technical infringement with his W15 underweight.

Toto Wolff’s adamant Mercedes did the ‘right thing’ with Lewis Hamilton in Spa

Additional reporting by Thomas Maher

Prior to that ruling, it was Russell who had secured Mercedes’ third race win of the championship with an inspired strategy call to go for a one-stopper.

While those ahead of him on the track, including Hamilton, were pitting for the second time during the 44-lap race, Russell told his side of the garage: “Think about the one-stop.”

They did just that, the Briton gaining track position over his team-mate and holding him off at the line where they were separated by less than six-tenths of a second.

Hamilton wasn’t impressed and made his thoughts known in the cooldown room when he told then-P3’s Oscar Piastri that he still had tyre life when he was told to pit.

He reiterated that to Viaplay, saying: “You have to put your faith in the people that you work with so I put my faith in my strategist. I should be able to lean on him fully.

“I told him that the tyres were fine and they called me in.

“Did I know that I was at risk of getting one-stopped by my team-mate? They didn’t tell me that.”

But according to Wolff, Mercedes did “absolutely the right thing” by Hamilton with his two-stop strategy.

“As a driver you don’t have the full picture because he said his tyres are good but at that stage nobody had a one-stop on the radar. We had to cover the cars behind,” he told the media including PlanetF1.com.

“So we had to cover and you can see that everybody else went on the two-stop. Logically it [a one-stop] just wasn’t on the wasn’t on the radar.

“What we did with Lewis was absolutely the right thing to do.

“But at the end, George made them survive which couldn’t have been anticipated because if it would have been any of the other top teams would have done it.”

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Toto Wolff on ‘clever mathematicians’ and ‘driver’s input’

But while Hamilton listened to Mercedes when it came to his strategy, told to pit and doing so, Russell himself opened the door to his one-stop strategy.

Running down in fifth place at the time, he had nothing to lose and proposed the Hail Mary pass.

Although it worked on the day, until the DSQ that is, Wolff was quick to stress that while a driver’s input is key so too are the men and women running the numbers in the background.

“I think we can pick out singular events where the driver had the right idea in the race,” he said, “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 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 and today 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.”

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