The problems Mercedes have had in extracting performance from their car has led them to try ‘unconventional’ approaches which have paid off with George Russell’s pole position in Hungary.
Team principal Toto Wolff described how the team has been forced to deviate from its ordinary development techniques to master its W13.
“We’ve done some unconventional things this season,” he said. “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 drawn in the wind tunnel, I would have said they’re never going to do that. “. And we did and everyone was proud of the results.”
Mercedes took a similarly aggressive approach to preparing its car this weekend, Wolff said. After a poor performance in practice, Russell took a shock pole position while Lewis Hamilton experienced a DRS failure and qualified seventh.
“[It’s] the same every weekend and more yesterday and today, we tried things,” said Wolff. “This is a data-driven sport. But if you can’t trust the data because it doesn’t correlate from the virtual world, from the tunnel, from the CFD, from the simulations to what’s happening in real time on the track, you just have to try things. and find correlations. Basically reverse engineer correlation and that’s what we did today and we had some positive results.”
After several setbacks in 2022, Wolff wants to see how competitive his car is in tomorrow’s race before declaring his latest approach a success.
“This season has been an oscillation between depression and exuberance, sometimes changing from one day to the next. We tried things yesterday that didn’t work at all but gave us a little more direction for today.
“Let’s be honest, this year is a painful exercise and today is one of those days where against all the trends of the season, where we’ve been really bad in qualifying but we performed well on Sunday, we’ve actually unlocked some potential in the car. If we can show tomorrow that our race pace hasn’t suffered, I would see us in a strong position again.”
Wolff hopes today’s result is not “another false dawn” for the team “and tomorrow we realize at Spa that we didn’t get the benefits we expected.”
“In this sense, we wait to see where this goes,” he concluded.
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Hungarian Grand Prix 2022
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