Otmar Szafnauer, team principal of Alpine, has an interesting take on the porpoising issue that has been noted by the FIA and is planning to bring changes in the regulation for the 2023 season. The issue was first noted during the pre-testing by many teams who had their cars violently bounce on high speeds. The issue was sidelined and not noted by many of the teams during the start of the season, but as the races went by, teams like Mercedes started to complain about the same, because it was making them lose a lot of time on the track. They were expecting the FIA to intervene and make changes in the regulations.
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However, another issue was that not all the teams were suffering equally, teams like Red Bull have an amazing advantage due to the aerodynamics, and they protested that no changes are needed whatsoever. This was fine until the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, where Lewis Hamilton suffered from incredible back pain due to the same reason, it was after that when FIA decided to step in and bring in new technical changes in the cars from the Belgium GP.
At the same time, Otmar Szafnauer thinks that the FIA should not bring any new regulations for the next season because according to him, it is not a safety threat.
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Otmar Szafnauer believes that the teams will adapt soon
Otmar carries the belief that the porpoising is something that the teams will soon adapt to the aerodynamics, and hence, no changes are needed in the current regulations.
“At the beginning of the year, we had a lot of porpoising. If you remember the first test, almost everybody was bouncing around,” GPFans quotes;
“By now, if you look at the whole race, did you see any porpoising? Not anymore.
“So I think teams will naturally get to a position where the cars don’t porpoise, you get the best out of the car, the drivers are ok,” he concluded.
It is a big gamble to not bring in any changes, but at the same time Otmar firmly believes that there won’t be any porpoising by the time the season ends, and hence there need to be no changes.
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