Toto Wolff caveats McLaren's Hungary victory after Mercedes' performance dip

Mercedes boss Toto Wolff has downplayed both McLaren's performance boost and his own team's drop-off at the Hungarian Grand Prix.

The current Formula 1 season has become a fierce development race, with the order at the front changing almost by the race as upgrades of varying degrees are brought to the track. 

McLaren brought a significant upgrade to the Hungaroring, including a new floor, elements of the front and rear corners, and brake cooling ducts. These aided Lando Norris to take a first victory of the campaign, with Oscar Piastri also in the hunt before a gearbox failure put him out of the race.

But while McLaren climbed the order, Mercedes lost its position as the fastest car, missing out on pole position for the first time this year and with Kimi Antonelli finishing in third - over 18 seconds behind Norris. 

"When you ask the artificial intelligence who's the favourite in Budapest, the artificial intelligence is going to say McLaren, because they were the dominant team here in the last few years. I think it was one and two and something like this last year," said Wolff. 

"So, definitely, it is one of the good tracks for them, and not very good for us. So, we need to be careful not to swing from everyone is suddenly competitive to a team is suddenly not competitive.

So, I think they've definitely done a step. They're in the fight. We haven't brought an upgrade for some time, and you can see that this is going to be a development fight also going forward."

Attempting to use strategy to gain positions on Sunday, Mercedes had run Antonelli long before pitting him for a second time, gaining the maximum tyre delta over the lead cars. 

However, shortly after he had pitted, Piastri's McLaren crawled to a halt, causing the virtual safety car to be deployed. This allowed the leaders to pit for fresher tyres, and negated much of the advantage Mercedes had hoped to give the Italian.

After George Russell suffered an anti-stall moment on the grid and fell to the back as the race got underway, Wolff was left with a feeling of what could have been. 

"Looking back, the prevailing feeling is that we should have done, "he added. "We should have done better. It is from the team's side. 

"We were unlucky with the VSC again. That could have been a P2. If we had a fault-free weekend, I think we would have fought for the victory or at least two cars on the podium.

"You can't fault the drivers. Kimi's defence on the hard against Lewis on the soft was brilliant, brilliant driving, and the same with George. I think he cleared 10 cars at the beginning through the traffic when we knew it was going to be very difficult."