"We wanted to play it easy until the summer break" - Mercedes boss jokes about having sandbagged until securing 2022 F1 Hungarian GP pole position

Mercedes boss Toto Wolff was a happy man today after his driver George Russell bagged the pole position for the 2022 F1 Hungarian GP.

Russell beat the Ferrari duo of Carlos Sainz and Charles Leclerc to take the position up front with a time of 1:17.377. Meanwhile, his veteran teammate Lewis Hamilton could only muster P7 for tomorrow's race.

Following his team's performance, Wolff was invited to a discussion with the Sky Sports F1 team, where he began by taking a sly dig at the commentators. He said:

“First of all, I am glad that I am invited again here. You only take the winners so you (are) opportunistic guys.”

The Mercedes team principal then joked about having hidden his team's true performance until the impending summer break, saying:

“We just said we need to write down everything we did this morning, including the food and drinks we drank in order to replicate so we will take it...We knew we wanted to play it easy until the summer break.”

On a more serious note, the Austrian expressed his hopes of Mercedes fighting it out at the front soon. He said:

“The truth is we saw it from the beginning of Qualifying that our tyres were in the right window and the car was balanced. They drove it really well then gained confidence from run to run and this was the result. That is a solid result, we were always off the pace on a single lap and now we are on pole so let’s see what we can do tomorrow. If we have the pace then I feel like we are in the fun and games at the front again.”

Russell's pole position performance will surely come as an impetus to the Silver Arrows team to get ahead of its woes this season. Its performance on race day, however, would be a true measure of its improvements so far.

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Mercedes had gone 'backwards' with its 2022 F1 Hungarian GP FP2 experiments

George Russell's pole position for the 2022 F1 Hungarian GP came as a surprise to Mercedes after it had a disappointing showing in both free practice sessions on Friday. While the young Briton finished FP2 in P8, Lewis Hamilton could not even break into the top-10, managing to finish only P11.

Andrew Shovlin, the Silver Arrows' trackside engineering director, said that his team's poor performance was down to certain experimental setups. He said:

“We came in wanting to do some experiments with the car, and I think the ones that we did in FP2 have taken us backwards. For the first session, we looked a bit stronger, the car was more together. There’s a couple of things that I’m pretty certain we’re going to be doing overnight, because it didn’t look great.”

It appears as though the Brackley-based outfit must have rolled back some of its 'experiments' to roar back into contention with a strong performance in all three qualifying sessions today.