The affair has been the subject of discussion in Formula 1 garages and paddocks since the start of the season and is a good illustration of the obsessive quest for innovation and technical performance that reigns there.
Motor racing fans have learned a new word this year: “porpoising”. Apparently, the expression comes from aviation and refers to the “longitudinal, regular and low frequency oscillations” with which aircraft are sometimes affected and which takes its name from the way porpoises swim when they dive and emerge successively at the surface. In F1 it’s something much more brutal that makes the car feel like the car is going way too fast on a typical Quebec street — that is, bumpy and full of holes — shaking up and down pilots him like a plum tree.
Here, the problem comes from a change in the regulations which aimed to encourage overtaking on the track by reducing the number and size of the small and large fins which proliferated on the cars and which caused, in their furrows, significant turbulence. The engineers took this as a challenge to their creativity. If the airflow can no longer be used on the cars to stick them to the ground like before, they said to themselves, we could use them under cars to create a suction effect.
We had already had this idea of a “ground effect” at the end of the 1970s. It was then based on sorts of articulated skirts which descended from each side of the cars to the track, but which, as soon as they damaged, letting air get under the cars and making them so difficult to drive that they ended up being banned after a few years for safety reasons.
This time, we were going to obtain the ground effect by clever systems of fins under the cars, our ingenious engineers told themselves. What they didn’t anticipate was that their systems would stick the cars on the track so well that, at high speeds, they would run out of air to keep going, causing the car until the airflow enters it again and brings the car down again. Played at high speed, this yo-yo movement results in bounces and shocks that pound machines and bodies, can blur vision and make fast turns perilous.
Danger
“It’s only a matter of time before this causes a major incident,” Grand Prix Drivers’ Association president George Russell said last week. His compatriot and team-mate in the Mercedes team, Lewis Hamilton, was pitiful to see at the end of the Azerbaijan Grand Prix last Sunday, as he had so much trouble getting out of his car because of his back pain .
Pierre Bélanger has sympathy for the drivers struggling with porpoising, but also for the engineers who designed their cars during the off-season without being able to test them on the track due to the regulations and who must now find a solution to the problem. . “Simulators and wind tunnels are not good at predicting things like porpoising. You have to go on the track for that,” explains the professor of mechanical engineering at the École de technologie supérieure in Montreal and former engineer for the British McLaren team from 2009 to 2013. “In the case of major changes like this year, c is a bit of a surprise box when you arrive at the start of the season. »
As for the impact that their innovations could have on the pilots, he admits that the engineers do not really think about it when designing a new car. “We’re looking to develop the fastest car, period. If this should have an impact on their driving, we say to ourselves that they will be able to adapt. »
Pierre Bélanger remembers, for example, this system where the aerodynamic support of the cars was partly based on their exhaust gas. “To get the maximum downforce, the riders had to keep their foot on the accelerator when approaching the corners. Let’s just say it wasn’t very natural! But the case of porpoising is probably different, he admits.
Engineering, Sport and Politics
Saying it fears for the safety of the pilots, the International Automobile Federation (FIA) said it was considering imposing a “quantitative limit on the acceptable level of vertical oscillation” of F1 chassis. In the meantime, she said, she promised to keep a closer watch on the scale of the problem.
It is not the same for all stables. Great rival of the Mercedes, the Red Bull team, for example, is doing much better and does not hide its annoyance at the calls for help from others. “If you ask all the engineers in the paddock how to solve this aerodynamic issue, they will tell you that it is enough to raise the floor of the car”, declared in a press conference on Friday its star driver and reigning world champion, Belgian-Dutch Max Verstappen.
He is right, says Pierre Bélanger. However, Verstappen and Red Bull also know that raising the floor of cars struggling with porpoising would also mean a loss of downforce, and therefore less performance. “All these discussions are not only technical and sporting, they are also political, notes the engineer. We want to protect the safety of the drivers, but we also want to win. »
If he is not bored with these backstage games or the long hours of work during the racing seasons, the professor admits sometimes feeling a little pang of heart thinking of his years in Formula 1 and his capacity for innovation. . “It’s still quite exceptional for an engineer to be able to finish developing a new part on Tuesday and test it on the race track on Friday. »
Free practice
Friday, at the Canadian Grand Prix in Montreal, it was Max Verstappen who recorded the best times in the first two free practice sessions on the Gilles-Villeneuve circuit. The leader in the drivers’ championship after eight events over a season of 22 will however have to be wary of the Ferraris, Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz Jr. having registered the second and third times respectively in free practice. The Mercedes drivers couldn’t do better than 7th (Russell) and 13th (Hamilton).
The 10 teams and their 20 drivers will return to the track on Saturday for a third and final practice session and qualifying for Sunday’s race.