New Delhi, Aug 5 Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff has revealed that reverting to an older suspension specification played a pivotal role in the team’s strong showing at the Hungarian Grand Prix, after a recent run of underwhelming performances.
George Russell secured his sixth podium of the season at the Hungaroring, passing early race leader Charles Leclerc late on to finish third, while rookie Kimi Antonelli ended a four-race points drought by finishing 10th. The result marks a noticeable upturn in form for the Silver Arrows, with Russell also missing out on pole position by just half a tenth.
According to Wolff, the breakthrough came after the team decided to abandon a mechanical upgrade introduced at Imola in May, which had inadvertently compromised the car’s overall balance.
“I think that we tried to solve a problem with an Imola upgrade, with a mechanical upgrade,” Wolff was quoted by Formula 1 as saying. “That may not have solved an issue, but it made something, let something else creep into the car, and that was an instability that basically took all confidence from the drivers, and it took us a few races to figure that out.”
The team had initially been misled by their win in Montreal, believing the upgrade package was working effectively. “Obviously, also misled a little bit by the Montreal win, we think maybe that's not so bad, and we came to the conclusion it needs to go off,” said Wolff. “It went off, and the car is back to solid form.”
Wolff was blunt in his assessment of the upgrade’s fate. “The newer rear-axle will be ending in a bin somewhere,” he said, acknowledging the disappointment of investing time and resources into a package that ultimately underperformed.
“Upgrades are here to bring performance, and there's a lot of simulations and analysis that go into the parts of the car,” Wolff explained. “And then they're just utterly wrong and you need to go back to the analogue world and put it in the car and see what it does and if it doesn't do what it should do, and that's a tricky case for everyone in Formula 1.”
He continued, “How do you bring correlation from what the digital world tells you into the real world? That has been a feature, and this is the last example of how it tripped us all up.”
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