Ferrari insist Technical Directive on porpoising not cause of F1-75 performance loss. Ferrari: Technical directive on porpoising hasn’t hit our performance.

French engineer Laurent Mekies, currently the assistant team principal and race director for Scuderia Ferrari, insisted that the Maranello team’s failure to challenge Red Bull for race wins in recent races is not linked with the Technical Directive which has been introduced by the FIA two months ago, starting with the Belgian Grand Prix.

The idea behind the Technical Directive was to reduce the bottoming-out effect suffered by the new generation of Formula 1 cars especially when running at high speeds. After a few drivers complained of possible long term health issues, the FIA took action and decided to introduce the Aerodynamic Oscillation Metric with the goal of preventing excessive porpoising and at the same time made some changes regarding how teams’ skid blocks are checked for compliance to the regulation.

Scuderia Ferrari have not been able to secure a race victory since the Technical Directive was introduced at Spa in Belgium and most of the times where no longer close in terms of race pace to rivals Red Bull, despite the fact that the F1-75 car proved to be fastest for the most part of the 2022 Formula 1 championship.

However, Laurent Mekies does not feel that FIA’s anti-porpoising Technical Directive is to blame or has directly impacted the Maranello team’s speed.

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“Really we don’t think there is any specific impact on our team here. The [directive] is a good thing. It’s putting effectively more pressure on plank wear measurements, which have been there forever. It’s doing it in a bit more sophisticated way. We are fully in favour of it and we don’t think it has impacted any of our relative performance, there is certainly other factors for that.” – Ferrari race director Laurent Mekies explained.