Mercedes feeling pressure of keeping strategy fight fair

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Toto Wolff says Mercedes feels a big responsibility to keep the strategy fight between its two drivers fair throughout the remaining races.

Nico Rosberg leads Lewis Hamilton by 26 points in the drivers' championship with three races remaining, meaning the German can theoretically win the title with victory in today's Mexican Grand Prix if Hamilton is no higher than tenth. Both cars will start on the soft compound tyre ahead of the Red Bulls on supersofts, and Wolff says splitting strategies is not the preferred option in case it ends up unfairly favouring one driver over another.

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"We have quite a big responsibility towards the two that we want to win the race, but sending them on two different strategies not knowing is the right one could have an outcome than needs explanation," Wolff said. "We have had that in the past, asked questions why we sent a Driver A on that strategy and Driver B on that one when it was clear that was the better one.

"If we split the strategy the aim is to defend the win or because we don’t know which is the better one. There is a responsibility, there is weight on our shoulders to get it right and be as neutral as possible in our decisions."

And Wolff admits there is no guarantee Mercedes has made the right choice regarding its tyre strategy, despite the general consensus being the soft is likely to be the much better tyre to start the race on.

“This is the name of the game, we’ve seen situations where we’ve not been completely clear which tyre is going to last, how graining or blistering is going to happen and when and how much the tyres need management to take them further.

"We have had that all through the season and the same [in today's race], the track temperatures have a big influence on the performance and behaviour of the tyre so that is pretty much one of the major variables of the race which you need to get right. It includes a lot of data, algorithms and common sense. We’ve been OK so far with getting it right often, but there is no guarantee that it will be like this ever.”

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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.