Red Bull had long been the kings of running a high rake on its cars but in the new era, having the floor of the car as close to the track surface as possible is the way to generating better laptimes.Īero and design guru Adrian Newey is arguably the key asset heading into a fresh set of regulations focused on design over engine. RB18 – Red Bull has opted to run the car a little higher than Ferrari but comfortably lower than Mercedes and isn’t experiencing porpoising issues Upgrades are on the way for Mercedes but there’s little use trying to find pace elsewhere in the car if basic set-up issues related to the bouncing cannot be squared away. “We are having to throw away the basic performance of our car as a smaller problem, in order to get the bigger problem – the uncontrollable bouncing – slightly under our control.”
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“We were caught out by it quite badly, especially when we put our first race upgrade package on in the last winter test, the amount of porpoising we saw has been quite extreme. How quickly each team can get on top of it and fix it is going to be quite an important thing for determining what the pecking order in the sport will be.
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“The mechanisms that cause it, while not completely understood yet, are rather different from what the commentators are providing on the web and on your TV screens. “Porpoising is something that caught all of the teams out when they first launched this generation of cars just a few weeks ago,” the team’s chief technical officer James Allison noted after Bahrain. Compared to the other two, it is almost running a high-rake concept, something that is not desirable with the new generation of car. “The cars that are ahead of us, for example, have an incredible amount of low-speed downforce.”Īs seen in the image above, Mercedes has had to raise the rear ride height of the W13 in order to reduce the bouncing, a huge detriment to performance through a loss of downforce produced by the underneath of the car. And there’s lots of performance when you can reduce some of those steps obviously. “Those that have had to raise their car, it’s much steeper steps that we’ve seen compared to previous years.
“I’m not being given exact numbers, but I know they’re large,” he explained ahead of the Saudi race. “We are having to throw away the basic performance of our car to get bouncing under control”īecause of the severity of the porpoising the team is suffering with, the easiest ‘fix’ has been to raise the rear ride height of the car but that has lost the team a great deal of performance according to Lewis Hamilton. The team attached metal stays at the rear of the floor to help reduce the phenomenon but that hasn’t solved the issue as much as it has reduced it, and taken away potential performace with it.
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Its new design had everyone talking but the drivers were still bouncing massively on the Bahrain straights with porpoising a massive problem for the W13. Mercedes has been affected heavily by the new regulations and its super-skinny sidepod concept hasn’t been the magical answer to its problems. Joe Portlock - Formula 1/Formula 1 via Getty Images W13 – the gap at the rear of the car and the track surface has been highlighted in yellow and is a sizeable chunk more than its rivals On first viewing, it appears as though Ferrari is the team that has nailed it, but the fact Charles Leclerc leads the championship isn’t the primary indicator. And Red Bull implemented a late upgrade on the third and final day of testing, with a shrink-wrapped section of the sidepod leading air to the floor which brought with it great performance gains in tandem with a modified floor design.īut until the Bahrain GP weekend, it was unclear which of the three teams had perfected the new design philosophy.
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