The technical directive which was introduced in August was the main topic of discussions in the paddock during the triple-header of races at Spa, Zandvoort and Monza.
In the summer, the World Motorsport Council confirmed the TD039, thus introducing the monitoring by the FIA of the amplitude of the cars’ vertical oscillations due to aerodynamic bouncing, with the obligation to limit porpoising within certain values. At the same time, controls were strengthened to verify compliance with the regulations on wear of the wooden floor plank, the flat component that runs longitudinally under the car floor. For teams that were beyond the limits, the main tools available were to strengthen the plank, raise the ride high and stiffen the suspension to reduce hitting the ground, at the risk of suffering a loss in aerodynamic and mechanical performance.
During the Dutch Grand Prix weekend, FIA Technical Director Nikolas Tombazis was interviewed by Tech Talk, the technical in-depth program produced by Formula 1, revealing how the technical directive affected most of the teams: “Almost all the teams have had to make some changes. We asked them to provide us with an overall and detailed view of the car, while we have verified and checked the actual correlation between the real cars and what they have declared. Essentially now all the floors must be more rigid in the lower part, to have a more balanced grid for all the participants. In this perspective, I think the teams have been quite collaborative”. – he explained.
Nikolas Tombazis’ statements follow those released in July, where it was revealed that the Federation was about to act with full knowledge of the facts, having found anomalous behavior among various cars: “When we spoke with all the teams, as we meet almost monthly, the matter was not highlighted as a priority topic. After the first races, however, we saw that not all of them behaved in the same way and so it was necessary to clear this aspect”.
The FIA Technical Director also stressed the importance of the floor flexibility on performance: “This year the cars touch the ground much more and the way they are designed in regarding the plank area, its flexibility has become more important than in the past. Before it was just something with which you could gain a couple of millimeters in height, but now it can have a lot of influence on the behavior of the car and on the driver’s perceptions. One aspect of what we are doing is making this feature fairer among the teams.”
Nikolas Tombazis’ recent interview with Tech Talk’s microphones contrasts with what was recently said by the Ferrari Team Principal. Immediately after the troubled Belgian Grand Prix, Mattia Binotto ruled out that the declining competitiveness of F1-75 was due to TD039: “It was not the case. I don’t know how the technical directive influenced other teams, but for Ferrari it is completely negligible. It is not the answer to our performance today ”. A week later a similar response followed after the Zandvoort stage: “It’s a legitimate question and I think more than one asks it. For our part, however, the answer is no, it is not the directive itself that is putting us in difficulty, so much so that, as I said before, if we look at Hungary it is a situation very similar to that of today. […] The directive, for what we judge, is negligible, but the fact that we did not go to Hungary is a further demonstration that it is something that has nothing to do with the technical directive “.
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Reconstructing the last four races of the Maranello team, it emerges in fact that some balance problems did in fact exist, with the Ferrari technicians suspecting that these are due to secondary behaviors introduced by the new floor that made its debut in France. The balance problems contributed to the loss of competitiveness of the F1-75 in that phase in which Red Bull found the right balance. However, similar aspects do not exclude a contributing cause of the Technical Directive 039 on Ferrari’s recent setbacks. From this point of view, Mattia Binotto’s words would be consistent with those of Nikolas Tombazis only if the Ferrari car was one of the few ones that did not have to make changes or if the stiffening of the floor was minimal.
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