Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsMercedes

No more compromises on Mercedes' strategy

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Toto Wolff says Mercedes will have to stop compromising on race strategy when Ferrari is such a threat, even if it hurts one of its drivers.

With no real challenge from any other team in 2014, Mercedes was able to focus on ensuring its two drivers had the same opportunities for victory as they fought for the championship. However, the same approach backfired in the Malaysian Grand Prix as Sebastian Vettel took victory for Ferrari following an early pit stop for the two Mercedes cars.

Wolff says the team has been focusing on delivering equal chances for Nico Rosberg and Lewis Hamilton despite it sometimes being detrimental to the overall race strategy, and the emergence of Ferrari this year will see that approach change.

"The point is that when you have a gap like we had last year, it is easy to compromise on race strategy sometimes because you want to assure you are keeping as neutral to the two of them, as neutral as possible," Wolff said. "And sometimes that is not the quickest race.

"So there needs to be a situation … you have seen the situation in Malaysia where the two cars have been stuck up behind each other on the pitstop because we wanted to mirror the race strategy.

"It could be that we simply split the strategies, if needed, just to make sure that, if you are wrong with one of the strategies, at least the other car is able to achieve a good finish, or win the race."

Click here for a look at the brake-by-wire system which caused Mercedes problems in Bahrain

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.