Mercedes did not have the best of Fridays at the 2022 F1 Hungarian GP weekend. The car did not look good on the track and even in the timesheets, it appeared a though the German team was entrenched in the midfield rather than challenging the front runners. What was even more disappointing for Mercedes fans was the final classification of both the drivers in FP2. Instead of snapping at the heels of the front runners, both George Russell and Lewis Hamilton languished in P8 and P11, respectively.
Distraught at the state of the Mercedes, these are some of the reactions of the F1 fans on Twitter:
Mercedes will roll back a few experiments that it did in FP2
Mercedes' trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin admitted after the free practice sessions that there were some experiments done by the team that didn't work out and that they would be reverted overnight by the team. Shovlin said:
“I think the ones we did in FP2 have taken us backwards. First session we looked a bit stronger. The car was more together. There’s a couple of things that I’m certain we’ll be undoing overnight because it didn’t look great.”
Lewis Hamilton was not happy with how the day went and was slightly puzzled as to why the car's form swings so much from track to track. He said:
“The car’s a bit of a struggle today. It’s crazy how it swings so much from track to track. It’s just set-up, trying to figure out how we can get the car working. At the moment it’s a little bit loose and it’s not doing what we want it to do. For some reason this track it’s just not working as well. Once we got it right the gap’s about the same as last week, around a second. It’s gonna be a tough weekend, that’s for sure.”
The team will be hoping to turn things around overnight because at a track like Hungaroring, overtaking is not the easiest thing to do.