Hannah Schmitz

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Hannah Schmitz is Red Bull Racing’s head of race strategy and one of the most visible engineers in modern Formula 1. Her job is simple to describe and brutally hard to do: take a flood of data, track conditions, tyre behaviour and rival moves, then turn it into the right decision before the race moves on without you.

Hannah Schmitz sits in one of the sport’s least forgiving roles. Drivers still decide races in the cockpit, but strategy can quietly rearrange the whole afternoon, and Schmitz has become one of the people fans most readily associate with that side of Red Bull’s success.

She is visible on the pit wall, but the real substance is in the judgment: knowing when to trust the model, when to react, and when to ignore the obvious-looking move.

From simulation to the pit wall

Her route into Formula 1 was engineering first, glamour never. Schmitz studied mechanical engineering at Cambridge, took part in Cambridge University Eco Racing, and joined Red Bull Racing as a student intern in 2009.

She began in modelling and simulation before moving into strategy, looking for a more direct connection to the racing itself. That background still explains a lot about her value: she came into the job through systems, probabilities and problem-solving rather than paddock mythology.

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That is also why her work is easy to underestimate from the outside. Race strategy is not just a dramatic radio call with five laps to go. Red Bull’s strategists prepare preview reports before each weekend, run huge numbers of simulations, model tyre behaviour and likely race scenarios, and keep refining those assumptions once practice, qualifying and the race start producing real data.

Trackside, Schmitz has to turn all of that into something usable at speed. F1 likes to romanticise instinct; this is the bit where instinct has to survive contact with maths.

The calls that made her visible

The race most closely tied to Schmitz’s rise in public recognition is the 2019 Brazilian Grand Prix.

There, Red Bull made the aggressive call to pit Max Verstappen for a third time, even though it meant giving up track position in the short term. The fresher tyres helped Verstappen fight back to the win, and Schmitz was sent onto the podium to collect the constructors’ trophy.

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It became a defining moment both professionally and symbolically: a strategist making the key call, then briefly stepping out from behind the screens and spreadsheets into full view.

That was not a one-off. Cambridge’s profile of Schmitz highlighted Red Bull’s bold Monaco strategy in 2022, which helped Sergio Pérez to victory, while Formula 1’s own coverage of Verstappen’s win in Hungary the same year showed the same core trait in a different form: adapt quickly, trust the evidence available, and be willing to change plan when conditions demand it.

Good strategy in F1 is rarely about guessing right once. It is about staying clearer than everyone else while the race becomes messy.

More than a familiar face on the pit wall

Schmitz also matters beyond the tactics themselves because of what her visibility represents.

Motorsport.com reported that, early in her career, she wanted her gender to feel irrelevant to the job. Over time, with change in the sport proving slower than hoped, she came to see the importance of being a visible role model and encouraging more women into motorsport and engineering.

That shift feels important. She is not notable because she is a woman doing strategy; she is notable because she is very good at it, and because Formula 1 still notices too few women in positions like hers.

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There is a reason Schmitz stands out in a sport full of famous names who never touch the steering wheel. She represents a modern kind of F1 influence: technical, collaborative, analytical and decisive under pressure. The best strategists make the race look obvious after the fact.

Schmitz’s trick is that, in real time, she helps make order out of the sort of chaos that usually eats teams alive.

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