After a difficult first half of the 2022 season, George Russell secured Mercedes ‘ best qualifying result with a surprising pole at the Hungaroring.
Although the team has no concrete explanation for why things went so well on the twisty and bumpy circuit, Silver Arrows boss Toto Wolff suspects that the philosophy they adopted with the elements of the car they tested and the set-up in every race weekend he has been instrumental in unlocking some performance in his W13 .
He cited the example of the team using a new floor at the British GP that had not been tested in the wind tunnel as an example of not doing things the way they used to.
“This season we have done unconventional things,” he explained. “I remember having a talk with a very smart lady when it comes to aerodynamics and she said: ‘If you had told me last year that we were going to install a floor on the car that we hadn’t tested in the wind tunnel, I would have told you that we were never going to do it.’ We did it and everyone was proud of the results.”
“It’s been the same every weekend, and there’s been more on Friday and Saturday here. We’ve tried things.”
Mercedes has struggled to get in the right direction in development this year, and the team has often found that the wind tunnel data does not fully match what is happening on track.
That has led them to be a bit more courageous in how they approach race weekends, hoping to find the answer to that disparity.
“This is a database sport,” Toto 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, with what’s happening in real time on the track, you just have to test things and finding correlations: basically reverse correlation engineering. This is what we’ve done here and we’ve had some positive results.”
Wolff said the key for Mercedes now was to understand exactly what elements had worked at Saturday’s Hungarian GP to give the team such a good result after a dismal Friday.
“I have no explanation,” he said. “I think what I’ve told Shov [Andrew Shovlin] is to write down everything he’s done today since this morning, including the food we’ve eaten, to find out why it’s going so well.”
“This season has swung back and forth between depression and exuberance, sometimes changing from one day to the next. We tried things here on Friday that didn’t quite work. But they gave us a little more direction to go.”
“However, to be honest, this year is a painful exercise. And today is one of the days where all the trends of the season, where we have been very bad in qualifying, but which have worked well on Sunday We’ve really unlocked some potential in the car.”
“If we can show that our race pace hasn’t suffered, then it would put us back in a strong position.”
