After the difficult first half of the Formula 1 season, George Russell Best qualifying result for Mercedes in qualifying With shock shaft in Hungaroring.
While the team doesn’t have a proper explanation for why things go so well on the tight and bumpy circuit, Wolff suspects that thinking outside the box using test and setup elements on each race weekend was crucial to unlocking something in W13.
He cited the example of a team running a new floor at the underrated British Grand Prix in the wind tunnel as a prime example of not doing things as they had in the past.
“This season, we’ve done 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 put a car floor that we didn’t run in a wind tunnel, I would have said we would never do that. We did it and everyone was very proud of the results.
“It’s been the same every weekend, and more so on Friday and Saturday here. We’ve tried things out.”
Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes-AMG, with Toto Wolff, Team Leader and CEO, Mercedes-AMG
Photography: Steve Etherington / motorsports pictures
mercedes It struggled to get a proper direction on developments this year, as the team often found that data from the wind tunnel didn’t quite match what it was going through on the right track.
This has prompted her to be more aggressive in her approach to racing weekends, in hopes of finding an answer to that disparity.
“This is a database sport,” Wolff said. “But if you can’t rely on data, because it doesn’t relate to the virtual world, from tunnels, from CFDs, from simulations, with what’s happening in real time on the path, you just have to try things and look for correlations: basically reverse engineering correlation. That’s what. We did it here and got some positive results.”
Wolff said the key for the team now was to understand the elements that worked in Hungary to give the team such a good result after a sad Friday.
“I don’t have an explanation,” he said. “I think what you said to see [Andrew Shovlin]Write down everything you did today from this morning onwards, including food, to keep track of why it is progressing so well.
“This season has been oscillating between depressing and energetic, sometimes changing 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 honestly, it’s a painful practice this year. Today is one of the days where all the tendencies of the season, we were really bad in qualifying, but we do really well on Sunday, we really unlocked some potential in the car.
“If we can prove that our race pace is unaffected, I will be back in a strong position.”