With just a few days ahead of the next round of the 2022 Formula 1 season, the Canadian Grand Prix at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, the governing body of the sport has officially confirmed that they will introduce some mandatory actions, with safety in mind, in otdet to reduce or completely eliminate porpoising in Formula 1.
The FIA’s idea is to introduce a metric, based on the car’s vertical acceleration, which will provide a quantitative limit for what is considered to be a decent levels of porpoising at each circuit.
At the same time, the FIA will introduce much stricter controls regarding the under-car planks and skids, in terms of design as well as wear.
Unfortunately, this may be bad news for the sides who seemed to be affected the most, like Mercedes and Scuderia Ferrari given the fact that teams will not longer have the possibility of running their cars in ways so that they bounce vert bad, even though such a setup would allow them to gain lap time.
On the other hand, Ferrari’s main rivals Red Bull seemed to be the team which has been suffering the least from this issue, which means that they could keep running their RB18 challengers without dramatic change.
What can an Formula 1 team do to limit bouncing?.
The quickest way to limit the uncomfortable effects of porpoising is of course to increase the ride height of the car. In this way the car is further from the ground and is less affected because it cannot be sucked so close, by downforce, that the car bottoms out.
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The FIA have already stated that they plan to carefully investigate under-car planks and skids to evaluate the wear generated by bouncing on the tarmac at high speeds. The solution of increasing the ride height will have a direct impact on the ground effect of the Formula 1 cars, leading to less downforce, less grip and therefore a loss in terms of lap times. As a result, all teams have been running their cars as low to the ground as possible even if this meant some physical discomfort for the drivers.
Yet the exact measures the FIA will impose as they attempt to remove porpoising have not yet been confirmed, which means it remains possible that Scuderia Ferrari and Mercedes (and other teams who are fighting severe bouncing) could escape unscathed.
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