The FIA has eased the porpoising metric starting with the Singapore Grand Prix this weekend, with the goal of helping remove possible issues caused by bumpy tracks, as reported by Motorsport earlier today.
Due to the heavy bouncing which some teams struggled with in the first part of the 2022 Formula 1 season, a few drivers complained about the safety implications and asked for the FIA to take action. With just a few days ahead of the Montreal race, the FIA confirmed that it was planning to introduce an Aerodynamic Oscillation Metric which all teams have to take into consideration and not exceed.
This means that all teams had to make sure that their car was below the maximum bouncing limit over each lap, or they risked being sanctioned on safety grounds.
In an official document sent to teams ahead of the Canadian Grand Prix, they were informed that not respecting these new rules may lead to the risk of cars being excluded from the official results.
Formula 1’s head of single seater matters Nikolas Tombazis explained: “Any car whose AOM exceeds the stipulated AOM [limit] will be reported to the stewards with the recommendation that they be excluded from the results of the sprint or race.”
After some debate and heated discussions between teams regarding the potential effect of such a rule change in the middle of the season, the FIA still decided to introduce the system starting with the Belgian Grand Prix, to give teams time to prepare and make the necessary changes.
By that time teams had already gathered information and had a much better understanding of the forces which triggered much of the early season porpoising so no team has fallen foul of the metric so far.
Yet here had been some concern that some of the circuits which will host races in this final part of the 2022 Formula 1 championship, mainly including Singapore and Austin – could have triggered particular headaches.
With the metric being taken as an average over a distance – initially 10 J/kg per 100km – running of the cars had shown that if cars hit bumps on the track then those impact spikes could serve to have a dramatic impact on lifting the overall average.
Running cars on especially bumpy tracks meant that teams could unintentionally exceed the AOM limit due to the surface of the track rather than anything related to the porpoising issue itself.
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As a result, with just a few days before the race at the 5.063-kilometre Marina Bay Street Circuit, Nikolas Tombazis has informed teams that FIA is tweaking the metric from now on to help alleviate the bumpy track complication.
The governing body has notified teams that to avoid excess energy spikes caused by track bumps skewing the metric, a new maximium reading limit will be put in place to not take into account such extreme impacts.
The FIA has confirmed that starting with the Singapore Grand Prix, there will be a top limit of 7G attributed to readings – meaning any track strike above that will not be taken into account for compliance with the metric.
This change in approach should make it easier for teams to avoid any risk of them inadvertently breaching the AOM limit.
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