Mercedes trio talk about their F1 Hunagrian GP where Lewis Hamilton lost out from pole, while George Russell rose up from back to Top 10.
For Mercedes it was a mixed F1 Hungarian GP weekend where Lewis Hamilton took his first pole in 33 races but got out done at lights out dropping to fourth after losing out to Max Verstappen and both the McLaren drivers.
He ended up fourth and was close to getting Sergio Perez towards the end after clearing Oscar Piastri, but it wasn’t to be. Teammate George Russell failed to get out of Q1 and finished sixth after starting from 18th on a track difficult to overtake.
Usually Mercedes are good on race pace but they struggled slightly in Hungary, even though Russell fought back up. On overall grounds, Toto Wolff feels that the car was second fastest still despite the results as Hamilton and Russell also add on strategy and performance.
Mercedes performance deceased from quali, cooling issues –
Wolff: “No, not at all. I think we had the second quickest car today, but the result doesn’t show it. Now you can say, in theory, we’re the second quickest car, but we didn’t monetize on it today. And that’s overall disappointing. And we got to find out how we could have done that better. You can see the George came back from a long way down, eating the Aston Martins, beating the Ferraris. So we just need to analyse that.
Hamilton: “I think it’s obvious we are not the quickest. We do not have the quickest car but I’m really proud of myself and the job we did to get pole position and outperform the world champion and the other two cars that were quicker than us.”
Russell: “The strategist was telling me this morning P11 is most realistic and P7 if we maximise everything. But to come away P6 with no Safety Car, no VSC, on merit was a really great result. Equally, it’s proof that this weekend was probably a missed opportunity. I’m confident I could have been up there with Lewis yesterday. This is one of my favourite circuits, the car always performs well here and when you’ve got two cars up there fighting for, let’s say P2, it gives you a lot more options.”
Start issues –
Wolff: “No, we were too careful in bringing the laps in. After the stops, we lost a lot of time, and it paid off towards the end of the stint because we were miles quicker than everybody else. But it’s always a balance and I believe the balance was a little bit too much in terms of bringing them in.”
Hamilton: “Today in the race it’s just reality. The reality is we’re not fast enough. They already told me at a strategy meeting this morning, I would be at least five tenths slower than the Red Bull. So the fight was not with Max, but I was hoping that we could fight the McLarens. But then McLaren was too quick for us also.”
Final stint pace being very good –
Wolff: “You can see that in the second stint as well. This is where we lost a lot of time at the beginning and gained massive chunks back at the end. But that’s a balance we need to look at, to strike that balance right. And surprisingly, it sounds in terms of pace, you see it was quick, quick, in terms of the rest of the world, in the F2 camp. The F1 car won by 38 seconds. So yeah, but in a way, it’s irrelevant. We need to calculate it and say what can we do better in the next race and then optimize from there.”
Hamilton: “We were just too slow in the first two stints. The balance was not good, the car was just slow. Then the balance picked up a lot at the end, and all of a sudden I was able to apply the pressure, but it was too late.”
Russell: “The three-stop was potentially on the cards for a few teams. I was almost calling for it at the end, but as things panned out the two-stop was quite comfortable.”
Here’s how F1 Hungarian GP panned out
