Nobody mentioned it. Indeed, the regulation change was written in a technical correction that the FIA issued only to the teams and that was enough. Because, in spite of the alleged transparency much heralded by Formula 1, the “rule” was removed in absolute silence.
What are we talking about? The removal of the notorious Technical Directive 39 that had sparked so many discussions last year. Nikolas Tombazis’ staff has decided to remove the AOM metric used by the technical stewards to control the oscillations in the chassis and comply with the anti-porpoising rule that had been introduced starting with lat year’s Belgian GP at Spa-Francorchamps.
We don’t know the reasons, but it’s easy to foresee that for the International Federation the introduction of the new aerodynamic rules (to attempt to definitively cancel out porpoising, the FIA has imposed a change in the height of the floor, which will be 15mm higher on the side edge than the reference plane, as well as a 10mm higher diffuser groove) could be enough to control the bouncing in a straight line, so it made sense to remove a check that would have used unnecessarily time and human resources.
Motorsport Italy has learned that the algorithm has been scrapped since the start of the 2023 Formula 1 championship after it was already relaxed at the Singapore Grand Prix to prevent some cars from going beyond the normal limits due to the large swings that could be generated not so much by porposing as by the frequent roughness of the city track surface.
The provision may be in place, but it is not acceptable to know that the decision was kept in the strictest confidence, almost as if it were top secret information. Can you imagine what would happen in football if the VAR calling rules for a controversial incident had not been publicly disclosed?
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The Technical Directives issues by the FIA are to all intents and purposes extensions of the rules: it is not enough to download the 2023 Technical Regulations file from the International Federation website to understand which rules are in force, because there are appendices that remain in the correspondence between the International Federation and the team.
As a side note, we also add that porpoising has not yet disappeared and the bouncing of the Ferrari SF-23, and not only that, are a clear demonstration of this matter, even if the safety-related concerns that inspired the discussions in Canada have disappeared for a long time. Those discussions then came into force in Belgium, after the severe bouncing that had been observed in Baku, especially on the Mercedes car.
Mercedes, in fact, had “suggested” to the FIA a regulation change during the season which the technical stewards had then ratified with the excuse of safety, the only reason that allows the International Federation to freely intervene on the rules without the unanimous consent from the teams.
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