After a difficult first half to the F1 season, George Russell delivered Mercedes’ best qualifying result of the campaign with a shock pole at the Hungaroring.
While the team doesn’t have a proper explanation for why things went so well on the tight, bumpy circuit, Wolff suspects thinking outside the box with test and set-up elements every race weekend has been essential to unlock something on your W13.
He cited the example of the team running a new flat at the British GP that had not been wind tunnel tested as a prime example of not doing things the way they have in the past.
“This season we have done unconventional things,” he explained. “I remember talking to a very smart lady in aerodynamics and she said, ‘If you had told me last year that we’re putting a floor on the car that we haven’t gone through in the wind tunnel, I would have said that we’re not going to do that. never We did and everyone was proud of the results.
“Every weekend the same thing has happened, and more so on Friday and Saturday here. We tried things.”
Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images
Mercedes has struggled to get proper direction on developments this year, with the team often finding that wind tunnel data doesn’t quite match what it’s experiencing on track.
This has led him to be a bit bolder with his approach to race weekends, hoping to find the answer to this disparity.
“This is a database sport,” Wolff said. “But if you can’t trust the data, because it doesn’t correlate from the virtual world, from the tunnels, from the CFD and from the simulations, to what’s happening in real time on the track, you just have to try things and find correlations: basically reverse engineering correlation. That’s what we’ve done here and we’ve had some positive results.”
Wolff said the key for the team now was to understand exactly what elements had worked in Hungary to give the team such a good result after a dismal Friday.
“I have no explanation,” he said. “I believe what I told Shov [Andrew Shovlin]write down everything you did today starting this morning, including food, to recap why it’s going so well.
“This season has been a swing between depression and exuberance, and sometimes it’s changed overnight. Here [on Friday], we tried things that didn’t work at all. But they gave us a little more direction.
“But to be honest, it’s a painful exercise this year. And today is one of those days where all the trends of the season, where we’ve done very poorly in qualifying but with good results on Sunday, we’ve unlocked a potential in the car
“If we can show that our run rate hasn’t suffered, then I’d see us in a strong position again.”
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