The return of the ground effect in F1 in this 2022 and the impossibility for the teams to actually take to the track before the winter tests has reserved for several Circus teams an undesirable consequence of the ground effect, namely the porpoising, an uncontrollable aerodynamic rebound when cars reach high speeds. The wind tunnel was not enough to highlight this problem and Mercedes has developed a concept that on paper would have given great advantages on the track, promises in terms of simulation not kept on track.
Toto Wolff began a crusade against porpoising by leveraging the issue of safety and the damage that F1 drivers would have been destined to accept in light of the constant bounces inside the cockpit. The FIA has accepted the requests of teams and drivers with Mercedes in the lead and a technical directive will be effective in Spa in Belgium aimed at controlling porpoising, with the cars that will have to respect a certain range at the cost of losing competitiveness through lifting from the ground. of the car floor to counter porpoising.
In 2023, then, the single-seaters will be raised 15 millimeters more from the ground than is currently the case. A compromise that the teams reached in the technical committee meeting held this week which anticipated the summer break. Christian Horner and Mattia Binotto, strongly opposed to the regulation change for 2023, stressed that the detonator porpoising of these meetings is a problem which has now been overcome.
This was confirmed by Toto Wolff himself by analyzing the first half of the Mercedes season: “Porpoising ruined our season because we couldn’t develop the W13 – said the Mercedes team principal – the more we increased the downforce, the more the car started bouncing. This has cost us months of development, we are far behind our rivals. Now, however, the car no longer suffers from porpoising now that we have arrived at the summer break. What we are missing are the months of updates that we have not been able to bring. The situation has been channeled in a positive direction starting from Barcelona ”. Therefore, Horner and Binotto were not entirely wrong in pointing out that porpoising is a problem that no longer exists. But the regulatory compromise in view of 2023 is essential for Mercedes to continue to be able to insist on the design concept behind the W13.
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