What is ‘porpoising?’ The ground effect problem causing headaches to Formula 1 teams in pre-season testing
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Charles Leclerc driving Ferrari F1-75
Formula 1 has entered a new era of challengers in 2022 with that comes the uncertainty over the performance of cars as all the data they have collected, all the tests they have done and all the techniques they have perfected in the past with previous challengers are of limited use.
The new challengers have already hit the track in Barcelona for pre-season testing and teams are working harder every hour to make sure that they hit the mark before going into Bahrain for the final phase of testing and the 2022 season opener.
The F1 teams are facing a quite unlikely problem something which they failed to identify in the thousands of simulations they have done to perfect their designs. Every team who completed the first day of training is complaining about the phenomenon with the new generation cars called ‘porpoising’.
The Race reports that Lewis Hamilton‘s 2022 Challenger W13, Haas’s VF 75, and Valtteri Bottas‘s Alfa Romeo C42 are the challengers which are affected the most on the first day of testing in Barcelona.
Find out What is Porpoising of Formula 1 cars?
Porpoising is a bouncing effect that has been a problem with Formula 1 cars in the past which the teams were able to overcome about 40 years ago but now it’s back as the teams failed to negate the flows in the New Challengers design which causes Porpoising.
Formula 1 heavily relies on downforce to make the cars go faster in corners and the car which generates more downforce becomes faster. The F1 cars face a violent bouncing on the suspension at maximum speed when driving in dubbed as porpoising due to the pressure imbalance that it creates below the car.
As the cars get closer to the ground the pressure difference between the underside and upper surface of the car increases to a point where the downforce stalls. This makes much of the load suddenly get released. In response, the front of the car rises suddenly and it transforms into a cyclic action that lasts until the car breaks at the corners.
How the Formula 1 teams can fix it?
Though the teams failed to identify the issue in the thousands of simulations and wind tunnel tests they have done it’s not an issue that can curb the development of their challengers. The pioneers of the Ground effect in the 1970s and 1980s in F1 faced and overcome the same situation then by either altering the surface shape or by adjusting the suspension.
With the modern technologies and engineering capabilities at their disposal, It won’t take long for teams to come up with solutions that can help them to maintain consistent downforce. Angling the front wing or using stiffer springs can be a few of the solutions that they may come up with.
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