Toto Wolff admits that reverting back to an older package made the difference for Mercedes in the Hungarian Grand Prix, having “let something else creep into the car” which caused a lack of pace at previous races.
George Russell claimed his sixth podium of the season after a late pass on polesitter and early race leader Charles Leclerc at the Hungaroring, while the second Mercedes of Kimi Antonelli finished P10 – the young Italian’s first points in four races.
The upturn in form, with Russell also only half a tenth away from pole position, comes as the Silver Arrows returned to an older suspension specification having realised the introduced of a newer package back in May was causing issues.
“I think that we tried to solve a problem with an Imola upgrade, with a mechanical upgrade,” said Wolff.
“That may have not solved an issue but it made something, let something else creep into the car and that was an instability that basically took all confidence from the drivers and it took us a few races to figure that out.
“Obviously, also misled a little bit by the Montreal win, we think maybe that’s not so bad and we came to the conclusion it needs to go off, it went off and the car is back to solid form.”
Wolff added that the newer rear-axle “will be ending in a bin somewhere” and that it was not ideal for an upgrade to cause unintended problems, having spent time and resources into developing the package.
“Upgrades are here to bring performance and there’s a lot of simulations and analysis that goes into the parts of the car,” he said.
“And then they’re just utterly wrong and you need to go back to the analogue world and put it in the car and see what it does and if it doesn’t do what it should do and that’s a tricky case for everyone in Formula 1.
“How do you bring correlation from what the digital world tells you into the real world and that has been a feature, and this is the last example of how it tripped us all up.”
