Inside the championship-winning Red Bull strategy room
Red Bull has given a rare look inside their NASA-style race control room which helped guide Max Verstappen to his world title.
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Principal Strategy Engineer Hannah Schmitz has opened the door on how the team calculates their race-day decisions, after leading Sergio Perez and Red Bull to victory in Monaco.
“I think it’s incredibly exciting," says Schmitz.
"You sit on the edge of your seat when you’ve made that split-second decision."
"Then you have maybe 20 seconds, which doesn’t sound like any time, but in a race sitting there waiting to see if your decision has paid off, can feel like a lifetime.”
Red Bull Principal Strategy Engineer Hannah Schmitz on the pit wall in Belgium. (Getty Images/Red Bull)
The team operates a NASA-style Operations Room at their Milton Keynes head quarters, which is run on an alternating basis by Schmitz and Head of Race Strategy Will Courtenay.
The compound gives the team all of the data available from the pit wall, and more, with every driver on track closely monitored to give the most data back to Red Bull.
It's a strategy employed by all Formula One teams, with Mercedes also operating a similar centre at their headquarters.
“We can be listening to every team's radio, we can be watching every team's on-board footage, we can be looking at all the numbers in detail and have that passed onto the pit wall in seconds," Schmitz says of her weekends on-duty in Operations.
"It’s like being in the same room."
"There’s no delay.”
Red Bull’s Operations Room at their Milton Keynes headquarters. (Red Bull)
At the front of the room sits a floor-to-ceiling TV, which when installed was the largest 4K display in Europe.
The screen displays 12 different feeds at a time, with each team member having two screens and a radio panel on their own desk.
“Most departments have internal channels which can be divided up,” says Schmitz.
“There is a channel for each department, plus a wider channel and an ops room channel as well.”
“It tends to be four or five steps, where each channel involves more and more people.”
Each row of the tiered theatre is assigned to a specialist team, with Strategy taking the front two ahead of Car Performance and Aerodynamics in the back.
Schmitz has been with the team for thirteen years, making her podium debut in 2019 at the Brazilian Grand Prix alongside Verstappen.
“It was an incredibly special moment and the pinnacle of my career,” she says.
“I’d actually just come back to work after having my first child so that was quite a big thing for me, to prove I was still here and could do the job well."
"It was just an incredible experience.”
Fresh from Monaco, Schmitz returns to Milton Keynes for the Azerbaijan Grand Prix this weekend, with Courtenay back on the pit wall.
At a circuit as unpredictable as Baku, the operations room will be as important as ever.
