'Why should Mercedes’ problem be everyone else’s problem?' Mark Hughes

The FIA issued Technical Directive 039 to the F1 teams ahead of the Canadian Grand Prix. It addressed the vexed issue of bouncing and porpoising following complaints from drivers in Baku. There, the combination of a bumpy street track and high speeds had Pierre Gasly saying he didn’t want to have to walk with the aid of a stick by the time he was 30.

The issue is very real but there is also cynicism about Mercedes’ campaigning to have it addressed, given that porpoising and bouncing are the biggest limitation to it being able to fully access the performance of its car. Especially so since Red Bull – and to a lesser extent Ferrari – seemed to have made a fast car not unduly compromised by either issue. “It’s easy to fix. Just raise the rear ride height,” Christian Horner was saying in Canada. “Sure that will lose you a lot of performance, but…” Why should Mercedes’ problem be everyone else’s problem was the gist of Horner’s point.

But all the cars are afflicted by it to some extent. It’s just part of the make-up of the 2022 generation of car with its unsealed underbody venturi tunnels and shallower sidewall tyres. The difficulty the FIA faced after so many of the drivers – not just those driving the Mercedes – complained about facing possible long-term health issues was that it had to be seen to take action. But in doing so would stand accused of caving to pressure from Mercedes.

Its resolution of that conflict, as contained in the original tech directive, was conceptually excellent but fraught with practical difficulties. Rather than stipulate a minimum ride height (which would have cured the problem but in a way which may well have hurt Red Bull relative to Mercedes) TD039 instead sought to define a hard limit on the force of the bouncing – and teams would need to run whatever ride height facilitated being below that limit. Which potentially would hurt Mercedes as it would need to increase its ride height more to stay beneath the bouncing limit. The problem had been addressed and in a way that that totally refuted the suggestion of caving to any supposed Mercedes agenda. It was kind of elegant.

But it couldn’t possibly be implemented immediately. The amount of data gathering required was immense but, more intriguingly, in that process the FIA discovered a complication: not all teams were mounting the underfloor plank in the way that had been agreed in the technical meetings. This had a big significance on the whole porpoising/bouncing issue and its discovery led to a much different set of competitive implications.

Red Bull (and Ferrari) were mounting the plank and skid blocks in a way that allowed a degree of flexibility in the plank, which alleviated the severity of the vertical accelerations. So at Silverstone, as well as announcing that the technical directive would come into force from the French GP, the FIA also stipulated that any car configured around a plank which flexes by more than the 2mm limit – which the Red Bull and Ferrari method of mounting is believed to have made possible – will be in contravention of regulations 3.5.9e and 3.15.8a (concerning plank wear and flexibility).

“It’s easy to fix. Just raise the rear ride height. Sure you will lose performance”

In other words, the Red Bull/Ferrari system would be considered and policed as noncompliant with the regulations from France onwards. It completely changed the likely impact upon the competitive order. Had the France interpretation been in force at Silverstone, some at Mercedes believe they could have won from pole. So the FIA’s obligation to take action following driver complaints no longer aligned with a way of doing this which didn‘t seem to favour Mercedes. This was unfortunate but probably unavoidable once the deeper look at the problem revealed this key mounting trick.

The obvious question arising is if the Red Bull/Ferrari interpretation alleviated the problem, why didn’t the FIA just make that solution legal? Because it only alleviated the problem by allowing them to run outside of the bouncing threshold when running at a pace way faster than the others. If everyone mounted the plank in this way, it was feared that the competitive imperative would lead to lower ride heights and the reappearance of the problem, albeit at higher speeds.

“This is a formula where the downforce is found when the car is down on the deck and that is a fairly tricky corner to work in,” says Mercedes’ James Allison, “because you want the downforce but you don’t want to smash into the ground and you’ve got to find the happy compromise. But even the best handling of the cars out there is still in a tight corner compared with what we’ve been used to previously.

“It’s welcome that the FIA is recognising that it’s not a happy situation where lap time and health are in conflict. It’s helpful if that’s recognised and we try to tiptoe our way out of the corner that the sport’s wedged into.”

Red Bull’s Horner doesn’t see it like that. “When you look at it, it’s not ideal because it seems that we’re giving more influence to the FIA to dictate what your set-up is. It’s a dangerous avenue to go down. I understand on the grounds of safety that this is being introduced because the porpoising on a limited amount of cars is at an extreme level and they’re looking to have a net mechanism to control that but it’s only something that will be there for this year as I’m sure the cars will converge.”
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Since he began covering grand prix racing in 2000, Mark Hughes has forged a reputation as the finest Formula 1 analyst of his generation
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