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Mercedes took the big decision to take a step backwards and revert to an old suspension layout for the Hungarian Grand Prix, and Friday's running provided the first chance to assess the bold move made by a team on the ropes.
Following recent struggles where the W16’s pace fell away and both Kimi Antonelli and George Russell complained about a lack of stability on high-speed corner entries, Mercedes elected to ditch its Imola rear suspension upgrade for the Hungaroring.
The team suspected that its drop in form and the feedback that both drivers were giving had been the result of tweaks it made to the rear wishbone mounting points, which had aimed at improving anti-lift behaviour.
While neither driver is pretending that reverting the suspension back has unlocked pace properly threatening the benchmark McLaren team just yet, early indications from Friday running in Hungary were encouraging.
And this was despite the lap times not telling the true story of its day, with Russell ending up seventh fastest, 0.793 seconds off pace-setter Lando Norris, and Antonelli down in tenth a further 0.103 seconds adrift.
It had gone the wrong way with both cars in FP1 and then it elected to split the set-ups for second practice.
The early conclusion was that Antonelli’s car was the better route, but his full potential had not been shown as he lost around 0.3 seconds after encountering traffic and dirty air in the final sector on his quickest lap.
Had he maximised the potential in the car, then the squad reckons it is pretty close to Ferrari’s pace.
Antonelli himself, who has especially struggled recently with a lack of faith in what his car was doing in high-speed corners, said that what was most encouraging about his day was that his belief was back.
“Yeah, definitely today was nice," he said. "I'm pretty happy because finally I'm getting the confidence back with the car.
“Still missing a little bit to the guys in front, but I think we're working well.
“We've been changing the car a lot, because obviously it felt like a big step with the old suspension, so the car was completely different and we're just trying to rebalance the car around it.”
Russell agreed with his team-mate that the W16 had felt much better from the off compared to recent challenging weekends.
“It definitely felt better to drive, more enjoyable to drive,” he said. “We both had a bit more confidence, and we're looking at the top half of a leaderboard currently rather than the bottom half - so that's an improvement upon Spa.”
While Russell is happy that a key weakness appears to have been ironed out, he said the team still has to be realistic about the gap to the front.
“It always feels good when you're a bit higher up the leaderboard,” he explained.
“It was a bit of a strange day. Obviously the Aston Martins looked unusually fast today and they seem to make a decent step forward.
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“McLaren, obviously, in a league of their own. So yeah, still, we just need to find that last little bit for it to start clicking again.
“For us today, it wasn't a breakthrough, but it wasn't like we were expecting it to be a breakthrough. We have just got to keep on chipping away.”
