During the 2022 Formula 1 pre-season testing session carried out in Spain, at the Circuit de Catalunya, the porpoising problem was an obstacle that all the teams found themselves facing and which they are still trying to definitively solve even after the first five races. The images of Ferrari bouncing on the starting straight of the Spanish circuit had caused a lot of discussions, thus making known the now canonical dolphin effect.
Already during the first three days in Spain, Ferrari had shown itself as one of the most active teams in fighting this phenomenon, with interventions also performed directly on the track, while others arrived directly from Maranello, with the use of different types of floors to study this phenomenon and take the right countermeasures. The most used method initially was to place cuts on the floor, thus giving up a part of the surface, to allow the air to come out from under the car and limit the effect of bouncing. However, this was only a temporary solution, as it involved a sacrifice in terms of performance and therefore lap time.
Ferrari’s Head of Vehicle Concept, David Sanchez, revealed during the Bahrain tests that the application of these cuts was not a long-term solution to solve the bouncing issue, but that a more definitive solution was evaluated back in Maranello. “In the medium term, the goal is to design a new floor that can solve all these problems and allow the car to express itself at its peak without problems of this kind.”
Circuit de Catalunya will now be the track where this new floor makes its debut with the goal of eliminating porpoising. This would allow the engineers to work with lower ground clearance, benefiting from more aerodynamic load from the floor of the car, therefore greater overall efficiency of the F1-75 car.
According to formu1a.uno, the Ferrari of Carlos Sainz seen today in the Montmelo pits, as can be seen from the image, was equipped with the updated solution that presents the classic tie rod, useful for stiffening the end part of the floor, and a single ‘hole’ placed slightly in front of it, without the presence of blowholes or the removal of further parts of the floor in front of it. It is a floor that closely resembles the version tested in Bahrain, on the right in the comparison photo above, but with the floor now no longer missing the part in front of the oval hole.
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The engineers also worked to significantly modify the entrance to the Venturi channels, which until now remained rather ‘standard’ when compared to solutions visible on the grid. In these first races, the technicians studied the flow trend and revised the entrance section of the floor, which rises less gradually between the external and internal parts, as well as the shape of the outermost diverter, raised in its front part.
The outermost inlet part of the floor is used for two purposes: to remove the turbulent trail of the front tires and expand the flow to attract greater air flow in the more central channels. Scuderia Ferrari until now had used a low entry side bulkhead; with the new modification, it is now raised and closer to the solutions of many other teams.
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