Red Bull strategy important weapon: 'Always have an idea what to do'.

In an article on Red bull's website, Head of Race Strategy Will Courtenay and Senior Strategy Engineer Hannah Schmitz elaborate on what is involved in such a preparation.

"We start long before we start the race," begins Will Courtenay. "We have a preview report and look at all the strategies we could take and based on that we say what the likely strategy will be. But once we're on the track we'll take the data from Friday practice, see what the weather will be like, how the tyres are performing, what the pace of the car is like and based on that our strategy for qualifying and maybe for the race will evolve."

Busy with strategy during the race too

For those who think that preparation is all that needs to be done will be deceived. There must always be an active reaction to what happens on the track, in whatever situation. "So if there is a safety car, we have a good or a bad start, or there is an incident, we always have an idea of what we plan to do, but that plan will always evolve and will either be a reaction to things that happen or try to anticipate things that might happen, so we always know what we are going to do."

Looking back at data from previous races

Hannah Schmitz says that they look back far, but not too far, in time to determine strategy. "We usually look at the data from the last three years for that circuit, so we can calculate what we think the tyres will do. Then we have all our recent race analysis which gives us an idea of the paces and where we think the rest of the field is compared to us and obviously that can affect your strategy. We will think about when we can make our first pit stops."

Next weekend in Hungary, Red Bull and Verstappen will be looking to run away again in both championships. Strategy could play a big and perhaps decisive role in this.