Scuderia Ferrari Monegasque driver Charles Leclerc does not understand why the Maranello team’s hard work in limiting the porpoising effect on its 2022 Formula 1 challengers gets thrown “in the bin” due to opponents urging the FIA to intervene in this matter.
Several drivers, most notably Mercedes’ George Russell, expressed their dissatisfaction with the potential harmful effects of porpoising at the end of the Azerbaijan Grand Prix last weekend and felt that the motor racing’s governing body should intervene in eliminating the bouncing phenomenon from the current generation of cars due to health and safety concerns.
While other divers were not completely on board with this idea, the FIA decided to respond fast by issuing a new technical directive with just a few days until the next round of the 2022 Formula 1 season, the Canadian Grand Prix at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve. In this regarding, the FIA will start to gather data this weekend in Canada as they attempt to understand what the best approach would be to create a maximum allowance for a car’s vertical acceleration and bouncing. As a result, teams have been allowed to make minor tweaks to their floors from this weekend’s race to help strengthen them.
The competitive order impact of the changes, as well as any limits that the FIA may impose in the future with regards to car set-up, is unclear at this stage. However, teams that were less affected by this issue feel it is not right for them to suffer as well. And Scuderia Ferrari Monegasque driver Charles Leclerc, in particular, is irritated that the Italian side may lose the advantage it has made from working to solve the problem on its F1-75 car just because rivals were not able to fix this issue on their own.
In a recent interview about the motor racing’s governing body’s decision in the porpoising matter, the Ferrari driver explained:
“On the one hand, I obviously understand George’s point, because when you see him and Lewis get out of their car after Baku, it’s very bad. You can feel probably the pain that Lewis is going through at the moment. And this is not acceptable. But, on the other hand, also, you cannot underestimate the amount of work that’s been done in the last few months by teams to actually get on top of those issues. This has been our main priority since the first time we tried these cars. We’ve been working to get on top of those issues. I think the improvement has been massive, and now all of the work that we’ve done, [do we] just put it in the bin because obviously there’s maybe one team that is struggling more than others. This is my point of view. I obviously understand that on Mercedes it’s very bad, but I also think that there are maybe fixes for this.” – he added.
George Russell, who led calls in the drivers’ briefing at the Baku City Circuit in order for the FIA to take action as soon as possile, added that for the moment it was far too early to suggest some teams may be affected by these changes in terms of lap time loss:
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“At the end of the day, the FIA are the rule makers, and they could bring in any regulation change they want,” he said. “Nobody sat here knows if that’s going to improve their performance or have a negative effect on their performance. So, we really have to see. There’s so many different aspects and elements of these cars, that by raising the car, it doesn’t necessarily reduce it or remove. You’re going in between porpoising and bottoming: it’s two sort-of different issues at play here. I hope it’s easier to drive for everybody and it doesn’t have a knock-on effect for performance for anyone.” – he concluded.
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