No table thumping could be seen from Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff after George Russell took pole for the 2022 Hungarian Grand Prix.
It had actually been a relatively concerning day for the Silver Arrows on Friday as they appeared to be around a second off the pace in practice.
Their one-lap pace appeared to be slightly stronger during FP1 and FP2 than their long-run pace, which was generally the inverse of what we have seen this season, so there was intrigue heading into qualifying.
There was also the matter of tyres. The track had cooled going into Saturday due to the rain that had fallen in the morning but the temperature had been brought up slightly by the W Series race, won by Alice Powell, and that had also swept away a lot of the water that had developed on the right-hand-side of the home straight.
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It was therefore, seemingly, easier for the German side to put their cars’ tyres into an operating window, and it showed as they topped the first qualifying session.
However, both Sir Lewis Hamilton and George Russell needed to work hard to make it into the top 10 shootout after they both looked in relative danger towards the end of Q2, so no one was really quite sure that their pace was going to look like.
They had been helped out by the fact that Sergio Perez failed to get a clean lap in during Q2 as he was shockingly eliminated in 11th, before his team-mate Max Verstappen suffered a power drop in Q3, leaving him 10th.
Hamilton’s DRS refused to open on his final run, so he had to back out and needed to settle for seventh, and it was the Ferrari pair of Carlos Sainz and Charles Leclerc that looked set to take their second front-row lockout of the season.
Just as Sainz was about to take his maiden pole though, Russell popped up with a sensational lap to take his first-ever pole position in Formula 1.
Wolff could be seen removing his headphones and shouting “yes” at the camera in the Mercedes garage, so his headphones and his table are safe from damage, for now.
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Russell failed to convert pole into a victory on Sunday, with him ultimately coming home in P3.
Hamilton, meanwhile, went from P7 to P2, with the seven-time champion benefitting from an alternative strategy which saw him run the Softs in the final stint of the grand prix.