Toto Wolff tells George Russell to stop overthinking after Austria win
George Russell won for the first time since the opening race of the season.
Toto Wolff has told George Russell to stop overthinking following his return to the top step in Austria.
Having failed to win since the opening race in Australia, Russell was back on the top step for the Austrian Grand Prix, earning one of the more comfortable victories of his career to date.
Toto Wolff gives mentality advice to George Russell
Having watched his team-mate win five races in a row, Russell needed a momentum-changing result in Spielberg and duly delivered, cutting into Kimi Antonelli’s lead by 10 points.
The real work, though, starts now with Russell needing to prove he has turned a corner but his boss Wolff has suggested he should stop overthinking about the things going on outside of the cockpit.
“It’s such a high-pressure environment that you can have a young team-mate and that’s your year, and then he’s so strong, you have a DNF, you’re falling behind,” Wolff told media including PlanetF1.com.
“I think, like every top athlete, you can kind of get yourself in a spiral and that is not spiral of negativity, it’s more a spiral of overthinking.
“‘What can I do more? Where do I need to optimise? And then sometimes you forget about the core essence and this is just driving the car.
“Is just being in the moment of driving the car. Don’t overthink too much about the strategy, what Kimi is doing, drive the car as fast as you can, and look at the tyre temperatures, and don’t burn them. So that’s the only matrix you need to look at, and that’s what I was trying to say.”
Wolff also suggested that the sport is too quick to rush to hyperbole, suggesting it was a switch between “mania and depression”.
“In this sport we tend to, and the same with some competitors, to swing between mania and depression,” Wolff, a team principal since 2013, said.
“It’s like one weekend we’re the greatest, and we are world champions, and this is all fantastic. And the next weekend is five days later is the big depression that everything is s**t. Upgrade didn’t work. The engine is not what we wanted, but the weekend before it was actually the best.
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“I think it’s important to keep the balance, to keep the neutrality. You’re going to have swings in performance, you’re going to have DNFs that go in your favour or not, and some you win, some you score solid points, some you lose.
“And it’s over the 22 races that we’re going to have in the season, hopefully, that you need to optimise on that, rather than to swing emotionally, and then declare a state of emergency, and everything is down the s**t.
“I mean if you would have spoken about George 36 hours ago, we would have said this campaign is really not going, and is he ever going to recover? Now, Sunday afternoon, he’s the real deal.
“So, let’s keep the trajectory that’s important, and that’s why I have never had any doubt that you know this can go very long in the driver championship. Who can potentially win? There’s a three-way race at the moment, and that’s why it’s about scoring those points.”
Additional reporting by Thomas Maher
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