Disqualified George Russell data emerges with simple Hamilton question answered

George Russell initially took victory in the F1 2024 Belgian Grand Prix. The Mercedes driver played with the one-stop strategy and pulled off an epic win, which was later dismissed by the FIA stewards because his W15 did not meet the minimum weight set by the regulations.

Despite the disqualification, Russell and Mercedes’ strategy election deserves a very honourable mention. The driver who started the GP from P6 achieved a masterful performance by holding off Lewis Hamilton’s attacks for more than five laps on a tyre 17 laps fresher.

How George Russell ‘won’ the Belgian Grand Prix

Russell started the race in P6, but quickly moved up to P5 after a mistake by Lando Norris caused him to lose positions. From here, Russell stayed in a DRS train with Oscar Piastri in P4 and Carlos Sainz close behind in P6.

Mercedes decided to make an early stop with Russell to try and undercut Piastri, who was +1.219s behind, and Sergio Perez who was holding podium position on lap 10. The undercut worked on Piastri, but the McLaren driver got the position back on the Kemmel Straight as soon as George came out of the pits.

The Australian also caught Perez on lap 13. The positions then remained the same until lap 21 when Russell managed to overtake the Mexican driver. At that point, the gap to Piastri was already more than four seconds after losing time behind the Red Bull driver.

On lap 26, the pit window was opened again for the drivers on the hard tyre. Lewis Hamilton was leading the race with +9.351s ahead of George Russell and +5.027s ahead of Oscar Piastri pitted first.

Piastri stayed out to try to get a tyre advantage at the end of the race over Hamilton and try to take the win. What neither Piastri nor Hamilton expected was that Russell was not going to play the same cards as them.

When Piastri stopped on lap 31, the gap to Russell was +5.5s and he was the provisional leader and no one would take that position away from him.

But what was the race situation at that moment, how did Mercedes and Russell see the possibility of only one stop? After Hamilton’s stop, the gap to Russell was +8.7s with 17 laps to go. And after Piastri’s stop his gap to Russell was +14s with 13 laps to go.

Mercedes saw Hamilton’s lap times on the new hard tyre and compared them with Russell’s lap times, who still had tyre life to do personal fastest laps. Hamilton couldn’t better George’s lap times by more than seven tenths of a second with 13 laps to go and seven seconds to cut!

With these good numbers still not enough to fight for the win in the first instance, Mercedes did see an opportunity to try to overtake Piastri, who also had to get rid of Charles Leclerc on track in his last stint. The hard tyre degradation on Russell’s car was unbelievable compared to the other teams.

The tyre difference between Russell and Piastri was 20 laps and 17 with Hamilton. It certainly looked like an easy task for Hamilton and he had clean air to go chasing.

Nothing could have been further from the truth. Despite being obviously slower, the difference between the times was not so great that Hamilton had an easy overtake.

And although Hamilton had his chance to overtake and was probably not as aggressive as his team-mate, Russell capped off the one-stopper masterclass with a great defence. A defence that saw both Lewis and George lose time to Oscar Piastri who joined the battle on the final lap, although he was unable to make a move.

A similar situation happened to Piastri as Hamilton did with Russell. The tyre advantage McLaren had hoped to have at the end of the race to attack Lewis was not as powerful as they had hoped and having to lose a lap behind Leclerc did not help to maximise their chances.

Ultimately, despite being slower throughout the race than his rivals, saving a +19s pit stop compensated for Russell’s lack of pace over Hamilton and Piastri to take the ‘win’ with incredible consistency- as we can see in the graph below.

Despite being the sixth fastest car in terms of average pace, Russell has the smallest pit stop of all indicating that he has been the most consistent. Even with a tyre that in theory should have found a clear performance cliff compared to the fresher tyres of Lewis Hamilton and Oscar Piastri.

And one last question: why didn’t Mercedes do this strategy with Hamilton instead of Russell? The answer is simple. It was too risky to gamble the victory against Oscar Piastri and McLaren, who could have undoubtedly upset Mercedes’ victory if they had also chosen the one-stopper.

Piastri had, before his last stop, a hard tyre one lap fresher than Russell and a gap of +5.5s as mentioned earlier above. If he had opted for the one-stopper, Mercedes would surely have given team orders to Russell to let Hamilton through so that he could chase Piastri.

In other words, despite missing out on the win, McLaren was in a good position to at least try to get P2 with the one-stopper. Although, their tyre wear on the medium was nothing good compared to Mercedes so it was, in hindsight, a difficult call.

Opting for the tyre advantage at the end of the race this time did not give the expected result.

Neither did they, or anyone else, surely think about making the hard tyre last for so long with such great numbers. So you can’t blame McLaren for that.

This time, we can just simply congratulate Mercedes for being clever and playing with two different strategies with their two drivers.

But, ultimately, Russell’s DSQ has taken all the spotlight away from a strategy masterclass.

Read next: Belgian GP conclusions: Mercedes fireworks? Game over for Perez and Jos Verstappen factor