“Fundamentally it’s always the same problem,” Toto Wolff on the problem of porpoising
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Toto Wolff, Mercedes’s team principal, managed to get so much information on porpoising that he divided it into three parts, “porpoising or bouncing or bottoming”.
Mercedes are on the run of their worst season since 2014, this could be blamed for their design having no side pods, giving them less of a ground stabilisation ultimately causing them a misdirect airflow. Misdirection of the flow gets the air to get up when running on straights and the aero specialization helps the car to get that downforce that pushes the car to get down, causing a bouncy effect called porpoising.
The new W13 seems to go through these struggles more than any other team on the grid but has still managed to get a stable P3 on the points tables. With 49 points ahead of McLaren on P4 and 56 points behind Red Bull on P2.
But somewhere the Silver Arrows managed to get a solution out of their misery, on Miami Friday. George Russell managed to get P1 in FP2 ahead of Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc. However, as the weekend passed the pace seemed to get off the Mercedes back as they finished only P5 and P6 making it their fourth double points race of the Season.
“It seemed on Friday the low downforce set-up worked and helped the porpoising, But the track gripped up, there was more wind on Saturday so it looks like it didn’t cure the porpoising,” quoted by GPFans.
Problems with porpoising also are not being helped by the data provided
Mercedes’s struggles don’t get cured by the data shown on the wind tunnel. The driver’s feedback for the working of the car doesn’t match with what the data actually shows, there is something more to it.
With the team continuously working to solve the ground effect they have reached a point of knowing where they could easily break and differentiate the effects into three different parts as mentioned earlier. But all this information is what the data provides over the screens.
However, if it is not similar to the direct hands-on information of the driver, things would still be a ‘pain’ for them as was seen in Emilia Romagna Grand Prix at Imola.
So said the boss, “As a matter of fact, the data sometimes doesn’t show what the drivers tell us, Certainly they have their hands full with a car that is just not at all comfortable to drive, nice to drive or predictable to drive, but the data doesn’t show these big swings.”
But all the misery could possibly come to an end with the next weekend in Barcelona, Spain. Where teams could possibly draw a line between pre-season and season cars performance.
Also Read: “Las Vegas GP saw four times more social media activity than the 2024 Vegas Super Bowl announcement” : Stefano Domenicali
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Soham Raj Jain
(480 Articles Published)