Mercedes will have to thread the needle keeping its strategy calls fair to both drivers amid George Russell’s title resurgence, team boss Toto Wolff has acknowledged.
After having to adapt his driving style to the new cars for 2026, Russell has been edging back towards his best form in recent races, accentuated by a dominant pole-to-flag victory in Baku.
His win cut team-mate Kimi Antonelli’s championship lead from 81 down to 66 points, as the Italian recovered from 16th to fifth to limit the damage from a costly qualifying error.
While not going as far as fully reigniting the title battle, it has at least moved Russell’s chances from near impossible to unlikely with a minimum of eight race weekends left to run. And a few weeks on from all but waving the white flag, Russell has also vowed to keep fighting his way back into the fight race by race.
That narrowing gap will also force Mercedes to carefully reconsider its in-race strategy, team principal Wolff accepted, as the teams wants to continue treating both drivers equally. That means that in certain situations, it will have to evaluate whether or not making the optimal strategy call for driver A would hinder driver B’s chances.
“Does it change the dynamic? I think from the overarching philosopher’s standpoint, not, because we want to give both drivers equal opportunity and to go for a championship,” Wolff said at a pre-event press conference at the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, the home of its long-time fuel and lubricant partner.
“But the team comes first. That has always been the Mercedes philosophy. With George scoring big points, obviously he’s narrowed down the gap to Kimi. And that means we have to properly evaluate the calls that we make on track of how we manage the cars, because we need to make sure that they have the same opportunity, also when it comes to strategic calls.
Mercedes W17 Malaysia special livery
Photo by: Mercedes AMG
Mercedes could take lessons from McLaren’s similarly tricky position last year, when the 2025 title fight was looking like a straight fight between Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri. But a culmination of errors brought Red Bull’s Max Verstappen back into the fight, including a Qatar Grand Prix in which both drivers were left out under an early safety car rather than splitting strategies. Meanwhile, Verstappen and others made the obvious call to stop for tyres. That blunder handed the Dutchman an easy win to take the title decider to the wire in Abu Dhabi.
Wolff added: “Whilst you can never get it perfect, there is this additional consideration that it’s going to be more important the more we come to the end of the season, the wider we create a gap to our direct competitors from other teams, to see whether we need to adjust our thinking during the race.”
Mercedes has added extra Petronas teal to the livery of its W17 to celebrate F1’s return of the oil company’s home race in Kuala Lumpur for the first time since 2017.
This weekend’s race is officially known as the Bahrain Grand Prix, with the Bahrainis picking up the majority of the tab for recovering the race originally scheduled for April in Bahrain, but called off due to the Iran conflict.
We want your opinion!
What would you like to see on Motorsport.com?
– The Motorsport.com Team
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: motorsport.com
