Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff has defended team strategist James Vowles after the decision was made not to pit Lewis Hamilton under the virtual safety car in the 2018 Formula 1 Austrian Grand Prix.
Hamilton was the only one of the front-running drivers not to pit under the VSC caused by team-mate Valtteri Bottas’ retirement and as a consequence dropped from first to fourth.
Vowles was upfront on team radio and reassured Hamilton that ‘It was my mistake’ and responded to Hamilton’s downbeat ‘We’ve lost the win’ with ‘I’ve lost the win Lewis’.
Mercedes has also struggled to make the right strategy calls in Australia and China but Wolff insists that the team ‘don’t need to make any changes’.
‘The most important thing is to understand why an error happens, and go back into the situation and analyse it,’ Wolff explained.
‘I don’t think that we would make an error twice. It’s just that the situation is very complex, we are fighting six cars and it’s just a tough situation.
‘For me James is one of the best ever, and it needs guts to come out and, in order to save the best possible result, say in front of millions of people ‘That was my mistake, now you can still do this with the car you have.'”
Vowles also motivated Hamilton over the radio saying ‘We trust and believe in you’, helping Mercedes’ star driver put the costly error behind him and concentrate on the job ahead.
’For Lewis, leading the race comfortably and coming out in P4, it was a moment where he was really suffering,’ Wolff said.
‘And we thought that it wasn’t all over. We wanted to recover the maximum points that we could, and at that stage we were all in pain about the mistake that we’d made.
‘James coming onto the radio is the mindset that we have: we are able to say that we’ve done a mistake in order to close the matter, and also to give him peace of mind that there’s complete acknowledgement within the team that that has gone wrong, and it was our mistake, in order make him park the thought.
‘It was about extracting what was left of performance in him, and helping him out of the mind loop of ‘How can this possibly have happened?’ By admitting the mistake it’s easier to get yourself out of the spiral.’
