Ferrari suffering from porpoising? Real reasons for aerodynamic load instability

06/26/2024 10:46 AM

The Austrian Grand Prix is up next and unfortunately Ferrari arrives at the 4.318-kilometre Red Bull Ring in Spielberg as the fourth force behind Red Bull, McLaren and Mercedes. The Italian side is coming from a Formula 1 weekend, that of Spain, in which various headaches made an appearance and hindered the overall potential of the SF-24 cars. Problems that led to a rather bland performance. Unexpected results, in short, on which the red team has worked very hard in recent days. The Montmelò weekend was not just any weekend, as the Prancing Horse brought a rather significant new aerodynamic update package to the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya. We are talking about a new rear wing, slimmed-down sidepods, and a revised underbody in its initial portion, as well as in the hidden area of the keel.

Ferrari tested the complete package only with Carlos Sainz during the first free practice session for the Spanish Grand Prix, with the rear wing alone mounted on both SF-24 cars. During practice, some small tests were carried out on Carlos Sainz’s single-seater car, even though the Maranello technicians decided not to use flow viz paint or various rakes. The package produced the numbers hypothesized on paper. That famous correlation between track and simulation environment seems to really be there. The new level of downforce has greatly satisfied the Italian team, which for this reason considered the updates valid and kept them on the cars for both the qualifying session on Saturday and the race on Sunday afternoon in Barcelona.

So why didn’t the Ferrari updates make the expected leap in quality? Offering a straightforward answer to the question is of course not so simple, but we can undoubtedly make some considerations on the matter. When such an upgrade is brought, the various aerodynamic modifications produce a change in the pressure field around the car. This aspect, in turn, generates a different balance, as the center of pressure is subject to some small shifts. Without a doubt, various headaches related to this issue appeared in Spain.

For the Italian F1 team, there was a lack of complete understanding regarding how to exploit the update. In other words, Ferrari was not able to optimize the car’s setup considering the new updates. We are referring to an issue we can define as within the “track side” scope, as the problem area was confined to the track. We refer to insufficient time to thoroughly test the innovations through the simulator, where the goal was to extract maximum performance through the setup.

F1, Ferrari: porpoising a fictitious problem. Setup and low understanding of updates the real issues.

Many have talked about bouncing, which is another way of calling porpoising even though there is no real difference between the two terms, present at certain speeds, defining it as the main cause of the unexpected performance. As far as we are concerned, we observed something else by watching every single lap of the Barcelona weekend through the on-board cameras. For Ferrari, in fact, a slight aerodynamic bouncing was present only in turn three, turn 14, and it was certainly not greater than that of Mercedes, which, especially in the qualifying session, made a big difference from the rest of the competitors in this part of the track.

Regarding turns 3 and 9, high-speed corners, porpoising was completely absent: for this reason, we prefer to talk about rear instability, derived from imperfect load due to imprecise setup by drivers and technicians. This aspect reduced the confidence of the two Ferrari drivers in the fast corners and lowered the speeds in certain sections of the Spanish circuit. This element was clearly noticeable when examining the handling and behavior of the Italian cars with precision.

Finally, a few comments regarding the performance of the tires. Ferrari did not know how to use them properly in the tenth round of the 2024 Formula 1 World Championship, especially in qualifying. The Spanish track, due to its particular conformation, put the two SF-24 cars in difficulty, unable to exploit the correct degree of grip in the three sectors during the lap. Ferrari team principal Frederic Vasseur himself confirmed this, although he preferred not to go into details in this case. The issue here is simple: the blanket was too short because sacrificing one part of the track to favor another automatically meant losing performance.

Unfortunately, unlike Red Bull, McLaren, and even Mercedes, Ferrari was not able to achieve and especially maintain the correct operating temperatures of the tires throughout the lap. This factor, in turn, made the grip during the lap anything but optimal. For this reason, Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz tried several warm-up strategies which, however, did not solve the issue. This problem was also suffered in the race with a lot of fuel on board, which, although to a lesser extent, still made an appearance and impacted the overall performance of the Italian F1 cars.

Source: FUnoanalisitecnica

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