Charles Leclerc explains impact of extreme Ferrari porpoising on race pace

Scuderia Ferrari driver Charles Leclerc confirmed that his F1-75 car had to deal with a lot of bouncing at the Albert Park Circuit in Melbourne, but at the same time has downplayed how the Maranello team’s extreme porpoising is affecting his ultimate pace. Charles Leclerc secured a dominant victory in the 2022 Australian Grand Prix today, ending the race with a 20 second-gap ahead of the Red Bull of Sergio Perez. The Monegasque driver was also leading the race comfortably while followed by Max Verstappen, before the 2021 F1 world champion had to retire on Lap 39 of 58.

Having claimed pole position, the fastest lap and the race win, as well as leading every lap, Charles Leclerc was absolutely perfect during the Australian weekend.

However, aside from his impressive race pace, the eye-catching part of watching the F1-75 car on-track was its relentless porpoising, an issue which affected both Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz in an extreme manner as they went down the curved back straight along the lake.

While Mercedes is struggling with this problem and feels it is affecting their outright pace, Scuderia Ferrari’s speed does not seem to be compromised in any way. Asked if the porpoising was something that bothered him on track, Charles Leclerc replied that it is not disturbing his ability to put in a good lap time: “I don’t know why, but I am not very sensitive to it,” – the Monegasque driver said, at the end of the 2022 Formula 1 Australian Grand Prix – “It looks extremely bad on the onboards. Of course, I feel it but it doesn’t disturb me too much, in terms of performance. Just for Turn 9 maybe a little bit, because it’s just tricky. It’s bouncing a lot. But it’s definitely something we want to tackle because it doesn’t help us for consistency, especially once you have bouncing in a corner – it can be a problem. So we need to work on that.” – he continued.

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The Ferrari driver admitted that the porpoising effect represents a concern for consistency, he also confirmed that his F1-75 car would not have been able to go faster even without the bouncing phenomenon down the straights: “It wasn’t an issue. I couldn’t have gone faster if I didn’t have the bouncing. For the restart, it was a bit tricky because I had it before Turn 1, so you’re never as confident to just brake extremely hard for Turn 1. But everything went well, it was just not so comfortable to do 58 laps like this.” – Charles Leclerc concluded.