F1: When porpoising was bad, the FIA came to the rescue of its 'pet' team

F1’s top technical chief believes the FIA was pressed into “overreacting” to the porpoising issue which reared its head in the first half of the 2022 season by its ‘pet’ team Mercedes. Their ‘pet’ driver was in trouble and they had to react, and react quickly.

Speaking to Auto Motor und Sport, F1 CTO Pat Symonds (shown above) admitted the bouncing had not been considered during the design process of these new F1 cars. He also hinted that Mercedes pushed the FIA into acting on the problem by being particularly vocal about it.

He should become a stage actor. The 37-year-old Lewis Hamilton was seen holding his lower back as he walked away from his vehicle in Baku, and even in interviews with media later on his hand remained behind him.

“I think [the FIA] overreacted a bit after Baku,” he said. “In Baku, we saw the worst effects because a team tried something that didn’t work and then went public quite vociferously. If people hadn’t intervened, the problems would have been solved as well. Most teams now understand how to control bouncing.

“I have to admit, it wasn’t on our radar. We should have had it, though. We had the means to discover it in advance because we were working with dynamic simulations. We used them, for example, to check what happens when a car spins and gets underinflated. So the type of accident that Mark Webber once had in Valencia.

2022 Azerbaijan GP. Mattia Binotto, Toto Wolff and Guenther Steiner. With his cars bouncing like a jackhammer, Wolff went crying to the media and the FIA overreacted.

“You need special software to do that, and we could have used it to anticipate and understand the bouncing. I should have known too, because I was still working on ground-effect cars. I had simply forgotten about it. Without a doubt, bouncing changed things. Teams had to solve this problem before they could work on their aerodynamics.”