After a difficult first half of the Formula 1 season, George Russell scored Mercedes’ best qualifying result of the campaign with a shock blow at the Hungaroring.
While the team doesn’t have a proper explanation for why things went so well on the tight and bumpy track, Wolff suspects that out-of-the-box thinking with test items and set-up each race weekend was crucial to unlocking something on his W13.
He cited the example of the team running a new track at the British Grand Prix that had not been evaluated in the wind tunnel as a prime example of not doing things the way they used to.
“This season we did unconventional things,” he explained. “I remember talking to a very smart aerodynamics lady and she said, ‘If you had told me last year that we were putting a floor on a car that we hadn’t driven in the wind tunnel, I would have said we would never do that. We did it and everyone was proud of the results.
“Every weekend is the same, and even more so on Friday and Saturday here. We tried things.
Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes-AMG, with Toto Wolff, Team Principal and CEO, Mercedes AMG
Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images
Mercedes struggled to get development direction right this year, with the team often finding that wind tunnel data didn’t quite match what it was experiencing on the track.
This prompted him to be bolder with his approach to race weekends, in the hope of finding an answer to this discrepancy.
“It’s a database sport,” Wolff said. “But if you can’t rely on the data because it doesn’t correlate from the virtual world, from the tunnels, from the CFD and from the simulations, with what’s happening in real time on the track, you just have to try things and find correlations: basically correlation with reverse engineering. That’s what we’ve done here and we’ve had some positive results.”
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Wolff said the key for the team now lies in understanding exactly what elements worked in Hungary to give the team such a good result after a dismal Friday.
“I have no explanation,” he said. “I mean what I said to Shaw [Andrew Shovlin]write down everything you did today from this morning on, including food, to retrace why it went so well.
“This season was a vacillation between depression and exuberance, and sometimes it changed from day to day. 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 been a painful exercise this year. And today is one of those days where all the trends of the season, where we were really bad in qualifying, but performing well on Sunday, we actually unlocked some potential in the car.
“If we can prove that our race pace hasn’t suffered then I’d see us in a solid position again.”
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