Toto Wolff, the Mercedes team boss, shared his perspective on the message from the McLaren pit wall, stating, “I think that these two have probably had that race situation hundreds of times in their life so they will have known what to do. I think it was more of a message like don’t crash, we need those points.”
Wolff attributed Russell’s performance issues to tire troubles. Russell had closely followed Carlos Sainz but had to back off as his tires started to overheat. Unfortunately, cooling the tires didn’t help him regain grip, resulting in a loss of pace and a position.
