Toto Wolff is thanking his strategists for the brilliant strategy that enabled Lewis Hamilton to secure his third win of the season at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya. At the same time, the German side's chief executive has also said for the first time that the W12 might be a little better than Red Bull Racing's 2021 car in some ways.
Speaking to Motorsport.com Wolff gave more detail on how the strategic plans were shaped in Mercedes' pit box. Hard calculations were being done by James Vowles and his team to see if a two-stop would pay off.
Mercedes has enough margin
"With our plan, if we stopped at that point, we would catch up with him [Verstappen] with one lap to go and we would have a tyre advantage of 1.4 seconds per lap. We thought that was enough, so in the end you trust the team and you trust the data. They were completely wrong, though, because we had already caught him four laps before the end," the Mercedes team boss said.
In recent weeks Wolff has always maintained that Red Bull Racing has built a better car, but slowly but surely Mercedes has to crawl out of the underdog position. Speaking after the Spanish Grand Prix, the Austrian said, "On pure speed, Red Bull is at an advantage on Saturday, but on Sunday that advantage probably bends our way car seems to handle the tyres well."