Alfa Romeo Racing was one of the teams that encountered the most difficulties in the first official outing of the 2022 Formula 1 season, namely the pre-season test session which took place last week at Montmelò in Barcelona.
The team led by Frédéric Vasseur completed just 175 laps overall of the three days of Catalan testing and only one team – Haas F1 – did worse (160 laps). After a few laps, the Swiss team alternated hours spent in the pits to try to fix or mitigate the problems that arose at each exit of Valtteri Bottas and Guanyu Zhou.
Like most of the teams, Alfa Romeo also had to deal with the phenomenon of porpoising, the hopping of the car that occurs on straights. The teams were surprised by porpoising because it is a phenomenon impossible to verify in the wind tunnel or in computer simulations.
For this reason, the technical director of Alfa Romeo, Jan Monchaux, admitted that taking note of the porpoising from the first outing was a shock: “If I have to be completely honest and transparent, we didn’t foresee all this”.
Guanyu Zhou, Alfa Romeo C42
Photo by: Alfa Romeo
“We had been discussing in recent months what kind of phenomenon could occur with ground-effect cars, but since none of our tools – simulator, wind tunnel – mentioned it, we were caught off guard. And I think it was. the case of most of the team “.
During the first test in Barcelona the teams were forced to raise the cars by modifying the set-up to try to contain the problem created by porpoising, but also to modify the bottoms of the cars by opening real holes in such a way as to limit the hopping of the same. , while creating an inevitable drop in downforce.
“The question will be: how much will we have to lift the car? 3-5 millimeters? Or 20? I hope it’s 5, because then the work we have to do on the car will be less. But we’ll see,” concluded Monchaux.
The words of the Alfa Romeo dt derive from the experience made at Montmelò. To try to protect the bottom from the hopping of the car, it seems that the technicians from Hinwil had to raise the C42 by as much as 30 millimeters, 10 more than the worst case scenario hoped for by Monchaux.
A bugbear, that of porpoising, which doesn’t seem to worry Vasseur too much: “I think that in 2 or 3 races no one will talk about porpoising and hopping cars anymore. We will have another problem or topic to discuss. But this problem must be solved. We have seen from us and the other teams that all made great improvements in the three days of testing and we will be back to do them next week with new configurations to fix it completely. “
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