Scuderia Ferrari has informed the FIA that the Maranello team does not consider new technical directives with the goal of limiting the porpoising and bouncing of 2022 F1 challengers to be “applicable”.
With just a few days ahead of the Montreal race, the governing body for world motor sport and the federation of the world’s leading motoring organisations announced the teams it wants to introduce a limit for the vertical oscillations drivers can be subjected to during a race weekend this season. This should force teams to change their configurations and set-ups if the FIA feels they are not respecting. At the same time, the FIA is also evaluating possible updates to the technical rules and regulations for the future in order to eliminate the potential for this phenomenon to happen and to improve the ride quality in general.
Scuderia Ferrari team principal Mattia Binotto explained in Canada that there is no problem in evaluating technical changes to find a solution regarding the porpoising effect, which the F1-75 car has been one of the worst affected by in this start of the 2022 Formula 1 season.
However, Ferrari is unhappy with how the FIA has taken actions in the last few days, as it feels it is tantamount to a unilateral change of regulations.
“For us, that TD’s not applicable,” Mattia Binotto admitted during the Canadian Grand Prix weekend – “And it’s something we mentioned to the FIA. A TD is there to clarify regulations, or to address policing. It is not there to change the regulations. That’s [a matter of] governance.” – he added.
Despite the fact that the FIA has the power unit implement changes based on safety grounds without the approval of the teams, there is still a process that needs to be followed. Mattia Binotto explained that the governing body should undertake a consultation with the Technical Advisory Committee, that represents the forum in which potential regulation changes can be discussed and tabled, before a new regulation is drafted and then put to the FIA World Motor Sport Council for official approval.
On the other hand, while the FIA did start a rather vague process of collecting data from all the cars during the free practice sessions at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve in Montreal, there was actually no bouncing metric established for the Canadian Grand Prix itself. It was felt that the complexity and difficulty of establishing such a value for the metric from all the data from the different cars was not going to be a fast task to complete.
The next round of the 2022 Formula 1 season, the British Grand Prix, is now being mooted as the likely implementation of the full directive.
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Mattia Binotto added: “They [the instructions in the technical directive] have been issued by mistake. Part of it, the metric, has not been applied. And the extra brackets have been not fitted in any car for the weekend. So, a big noise for nothing.”
The Ferrari boss has also pointed out a different component of the FIA’s technical directive in which it has allowed teams to introduce a second floor stay in order to help any team affected by bouncing to stiffen its floors and therefore limit the effects of porpoising. However, only one team apparently had the time and resources to introduce such an element in Canada, much to the curiosity of rival teams – including Scuderia Ferrari – as Mattia Binotto wondered how it could have readied a part so quickly given notice of the technical directive only came on Thursday, just one day ahead of the first free practice session for the Canadian Grand Prix in Montreal.
The second stay appeared on George Russell’s Mercedes car in FP1 on Friday at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve and Lewis Hamilton’s as well in FP2. Mercedes boss Toto Wolff tried to explain this by describing it as an attempt at responding to the FIA technical directive on-site.
Mattia Binotto was of course sceptical about Mercedes’ claim, though: “Toto says they did it overnight,” Binotto said of his Mercedes counterpart Toto Wolff. What I can say is that Ferrari would not be capable of doing it. No doubt I’m surprised that a team is so strong in doing that overnight. I can maybe only trust what he’s saying.” – the Ferrari boss concluded.
