Since the Formula 1 made the debut of the 2022 season, it was already glimpsed what was going to be the great handicap of the new era with the regulatory change: the ‘porposing’.
This shaking of the single-seaters at high speeds not only endangered the integrity of the driver, but also of the car itself, as well as hindered the lap times.
On some computers like Mercedes was accentuated excessively, while others like Red Bull They knew how to alleviate it by making use of aerodynamics.
In case of Aston Martin was peculiar: they started with problems very similar to those of the brand of the star, but at the same time Spanish Grand Prix in Montmeló They arrived with a car similar to those of energy drinks that lessened the ravages of ‘porpoising’.
Now, facing 2023, those from Silverstone want to eradicate them as much as possible… but they know that in Formula 1 there is nothing empirical.
This is how he explained it Eric Blandindeputy technical director of Aston Martin, in statements to the British team’s own website.
“It won’t go away completely. It’s something inherent in this set of rules. You have big tunnels that channel air under a car that rolls very low to the ground and you have a skirt created by the edge of the ground that seals the air in: this combination is what makes the car susceptible to porpoising.” .
“Every F1 car experiences some degree of oscillation, but with the current regulations, due to downforce and the variation of that downforce, this oscillation is more pronounced,” he adds, noting that it will be difficult to know the solution at the factory: “Simulating the problem is difficult. There aren’t many tools that can do that.”
From a computational point of view, you can’t predict it with normal software. It’s not just about running the car in the wind tunnel to see if it oscillates: it doesn’t work that way because it’s a dynamic problem, the downforce is constantly changing,” he explains.
“We have focused on making changes to this year’s car that will prevent porpoising, but we can’t guarantee it will work until we test it on the track. If we suffer it, we have several tools in our arsenal to combat them,” he ditch.
Aston Martinwhich will present a AMR23 at “90%” different from the 2022 carhopes to give a winning car to Fernando Alonso. The team’s forecasts are very positive, but a large part of the result will fall on how they will solve the ‘porpoising’, that ‘Achilles heel’ that weighed down Mercedes last year.
