Mercedes is investigating why the suspension upgrades introduced at the start of the European season are undermining competitiveness after it was removed at the Hungarian Grand Prix.
George Russell finished third in Budapest, earning the team’s first European podium this season, winning the Canadian victory and podium. Team Principal Totowolf believes that the Montreal results actually led to Mercedes leaving the car’s suspension longer than it should have been, and the performance enjoyed in Budapest shows that the car is more predictable in its previous configuration.
“I think we tried to solve the problem with a mechanical upgrade (at Imola in May),” Wolf said. “And that may or may not solve the problem, but it allows something else to sneak into the car, and it was basically an instability that took all the trust from the driver, and it took us some races to understand that.
“Obviously, I misunderstood a bit with the Montreal victory. I think it’s probably not that bad. In the end, I came to the conclusion that it needs to be out.
Wolff acknowledges that this situation is a concern as Mercedes shows a lack of correlation between simulation tools and reality, indicating that it has a very significant impact on the characteristics of the car.
“The upgrades are here to bring performance, and there are a lot of simulations and analysis that go into the car part. And they’re totally wrong, so you have to go back to the analog world and put it in the car, see what it should do and see what it should do,” he said. “And that’s how, for everyone in Formula 1, the digital world correlates from telling you to the real world? That’s the feature, and this is the last example of how it got us overwhelmed.”
Trackside Engineering Director Andrew Shovlin explains the impact of the changes in greater detail and says the suspension issue can be used to improve Mercedes’ understanding of 2026 automobile development.
“When we do new suspensions, we do that to make the car faster,” Shoblin said. “And obviously there’s something that’s not right. There’s an area where the driver said the car definitely better at its stop. But when it comes to stability on fast corners, some of the corners where they need to carry a lot of speed on entry weren’t confident they were pushing the car the way they wanted.
“So we were always trying to make something that would improve the pace of the car, and this wasn’t the case. A lot of the work that’s going on right now is to understand exactly what caused that problem.
“It wasn’t a death. Otherwise, there would have been no problem in the first place. But there’s a lot of learning out there, and this year will benefit us.