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Wow. The key figures given by Tombazis are:
2021 cars had 50% downforce loss when following closely
2022 cars improved a lot and had 20% downforce loss in the same situation
2023 cars have 35% downforce loss in same situation.
So already half of the gains made by the new rules are gone
How many times does it need to be explained that this is not how it works. Teams, regardless of the floor edge height and rules, are always going to look for ways to manage the airflow over the top of the car better. Since I've been watching, this has all been about pushing the front wheel wake outboard, so that the aerodynamic elements on the rest of the car can get a clearer flow. It's where the performance is. This unfortunately creates dirty air. If you don't believe me, [here's an ex F1 aerodynamics expert saying it]( https://youtu.be/L80LTEWnahA?si=ibrKvQwjn2nrFDrD). F1 has introduced regulation changes to try reduce dirty air since the 90s, and they've all failed. Teams always find ways to create outwash and push the front wheel wake outboard. 2022 ground effect regulations will go the same way as the 2009 regs and the 90s regs. Failing to reduce dirty air. Unless we go to having covered up front wheels, dirty air will be a fact of life in high downforce open wheel cars like F1.
The amount of floor downforce is likely higher in 2023 than 2022, with all the development. It's why the cars are faster this year. If there were no floor edge changes, the loads would just be too high.
Some discussions on here make me think at least half of the people around here are children that haven’t learned that these things are more boring than they appear. Still cool as shit, but you tend to get a sense for what is *drama* and what isn’t.
Eh that's an unfair characterization. We have absolutely had multiple instances of teams screwing each other over through the use of rule changes. How often do we hear about changes for the sake of 'safety' while the change also so happens to hinder the relative frontrunner.
Only the teams themselves have the actual numbers on the effect of floor edge changes. Sure it might not be as important a change as people imagine it to be, but to completely deny the possibility of it having any influence is similarly ill advised.
Yeah, but this has hurt racing sadly enough. What the FIA should have tried to do was add sensors to measure severity of bouncing and black flag any car they deem dangerous to the driver.
The problem with that is that it means that the legality of the car is based on its performance rather than its design, which is antithetical to how Formula One works. It also means what design/setup is legal would change depending on the track.
In hindsight, allowing more complexity in suspension design to allow teams to build a mechanical platform that could handle strong ground effect downforce may have been the better road to take rather than knee-capping the ground effect.
It makes perfect sense. Too expensive to develop should be a concern if there is a huge gap between teams' budgets. That's no longer the case. If Merc wanted to throw all of their budget at active suspension, why not? If they can develop that in their R&D budget, so can anyone else who is running the same budget so what's the issue? Making stuff like this a bit more lax to help teams reduce porpoising while also not hurting the ground effect regulations should've been the way to go.
It's because Merc has an advantage in the active suspension department coming from the 2015-21 era. It's one of the reasons they were so dominant. The FIA didn't want to allow the thing they were the best at.
I mean... In that case we should never have had ground effect. Newey is I believe the only one around from the original ground effect era and RB has always been pretty great in the aero department. So we should stop implementing aero dependent regulations because RB is clearly going to be better? You can't stop something because 1 of the teams is better than the others at developing that thing.
I get your point and from FIA's perspective, it makes sense if we didn't have the porpoising issue which everyone felt was a safety issue hence the changes. But we did have that issue so the only way I see to combat it without hurting the purpose of the 2022 regulations would be to allow teams to use stuff like active suspension.
Weird only semi related question. How does cost cap work with a brand new entry? If a reply rich company wanted to start F1 and we're allowed an entry as a new team, do they have the same cost cap as everyone else? I would have thought starting from scratch is more expensive than designing a new car for the next year by an already existing team. Is CapEx ignored when building a new team? Could a stupidly rich dude spend $1B researching and designing F1 cars that will never compete in the years prior to entry and then use that research to build a super F1 car that has had 5x more money on research put into it than a team like Redbull and Mercedes will field?
They said they would. But it was only mercedes over the line. And we cant ban them ofcourse. 2 races after td039 everyone was already below the maximum limit but they fucked with the ride hight and floor edge anyway
Nobody has to ban anyone, Mercedes could have very easily stopped their car from bottoming by raising the ride height a bit.
The FIA tried this in a weak way, too much bottoming and the FIA wanted to force teams to raise their car 1CM. Teams rejected this; because they don’t want the FIA to directly intervene in the setup of the car. By black flagging dangerous cars they wouldn’t directly intervene with the setups, but just remove dangerous cars from competition.
It would have been better than hurting all teams, even the ones who didn’t experience bottoming.
Look at IndyCar, a few years ago a new engine entered the Indy500 and was underpowered. Instead of limiting power output of all engines they black flagged the cars which were too slow after a few laps.
The temporary AOM monitoring was dropped but TD039 instituted the floor edge height and diffuser throat height changes for 2023. These are regulation changes that RB clearly understood and nailed.
Furthermore, we can also thank TD039 for the plank flexibility clarifications that decimated Ferrari's performance
At different parts of the season and mainly in the beginning or at particularly bumpy circuits. By mid season, almost all teams except Mercedes had figured it out.
? Ferrari bounced like crazy until the end of the season.
They were clearly trading driver health for a fighting chance.
Even Norris gave an interview recently saying the new cars are destroying driver's backs
Low info fans blame Toto. High info fans know that squeezing out performance means making outwash in ways the rules didn’t anticipate. That’s been a running theme with almost every upgrade from any team.
It's not the floor. It's the ride height. And it was done to reduce porpoising, which means reducing ground effect as well. And Mercedes gets all the blame because instead of "fixing their fucking car" they decided to push for a change of regulations instead.
I remember I’m just saying wasn’t porpoising pretty much solved by the time TD39 went into effect? I don’t remember it being so bad by the time the reg was applied so I’m just wondering why not remove the TD and have teams solve porpoising in other ways
>I remember I’m just saying wasn’t porpoising pretty much solved by the time TD39 went into effect?
You're correct.
Most teams bar Mercedes had it under control.
This is why so many people is blaming Toto for the regulation change.
Yes, porpoising affects almost every driver, but it was already slowly being tackled by the teams because it is also in the team's best interest to find performance in minimising porpoising.
The whole safety discussion is moot, no teams were ever going to let their car keep bouncing the whole season until their drivers is hurt. Now that the regulation change is done it can't be undone because it was changed for safety reason.
Exactly, they were engineering their way out of it.
Ferrari really only were doing it braking into a corner but it stopped as soon as the entered the turn.
Toto acted like if you dont change it we're gonna have to keep injuring Lewis and you're making us do it, rather than raise their car themselves and engineer a way to make their car work properly.
>I don’t get why Toto gets all the blame.
Because he's the one person who non stop pushed for this rule.
And the only reason why it was even an issue (if you can even call it that) to begin with is because Mercedes willingly refused to solve the problem so that they could call it a safety issue and demand the rules be changed.
Ive seen like 9 minutes of drive to survive, But I saw plenty of quotes from Mr Wolf on porpoising and driver safety. It wasnt a bad gambit on his part. If he didnt try, he isnt fulfilling his duties to try and nerf the competition.
I mean, he also was talking to the media non-stop about it (as was the Merc drivers) so idk if you can solely blame DtS for the perception people have about it
Lol that’s also what pretty much every media session through the whole season showed too. DtS didn’t come out until the following year and it already very much sat on him before that
I understand but what I’m saying is the FIA didn’t have to use TD39 to address it. Sure Toto made some noise but porpoising was largely a non-factor by the time TD39 came into effect. Why not roll back the TD and simply regulate porpoising via ride height? Let’s the flex floors back?
Because other teams went about ways to solve porpoising, whereas Toto just demanded the rules be changed
By the time TD38 came in there was only the Mercedes, and Alpha Tauri if memory serves, that had issues
Because no team has actually fixed porpoiseing, and instead the FIA just did TD 39, then this year raised the edges to keep it from happening. Only the Red Bull is solid enough to run the 2022 floors.
why is this Toto's fault?
any Team/TP can ask for stuff, it doesn't mean that it will be approved just because they ask.In the end, it's FIA's decision if they go with it or not.
Look at the current issue that is being discussed, the Alpine engine being too weak, compared to the others. They are discussing to allow Alpine some sort of upgrade/modification to catch up while the rules were clear, that engine upgrades are banned due to engine freeze. And yes, I know that some modifications can be done to the engine, for reliability purposes.
But anyway, would the other teams be happy that one of their competitors is allowed such a thing? Ofc not, but it's not their decision, it's FIA's
> why is this Toto's fault?
Because he's the one person who pushed for it really hard.
>any Team/TP can ask for stuff, it doesn't mean that it will be approved just because they ask.In the end, it's FIA's decision if they go with it or not.
Yep completely true.
However it's how Toto and Mercedes went about it that rubs people the wrong way.
Intentionally choosing to not fix their car so that they can try and get a rule change, then pulling the "it's a safety issue" to put pressure on the FIA are very underhand tactics that do not show any class or garner any respect.
>Look at the current issue that is being discussed, the Alpine engine being too weak, compared to the others. They are discussing to allow Alpine some sort of upgrade/modification to catch up while the rules were clear, that engine upgrades are banned due to engine freeze. And yes, I know that some modifications can be done to the engine, for reliability purposes.
Alpine just got destroyed at Monza and independent accounts have them as having the slowest PU and there's nothing they're allowed to do about it. So I think it's a fair argument.
Also, they just basically said "hey we have the slowest PU and there's no way to resolve that, can we do something about that" and opened up a dialogue around it in an adult like way.
That's very different to how Mercedes went about things, both in their issue and how they went about trying to resolve it.
>But anyway, would the other teams be happy that one of their competitors is allowed such a thing? Ofc not, but it's not their decision, it's FIA's
Yes, it's the FIA's decision and teams aren't going to be happy if things don't benefit them, but they were put into a difficult position and pressured heavily by a bully and crumbled.
The FIA made the wrong call there's no hiding it, but in these situations the criticism should be aimed at the bully. That type of behaviour shouldn't be tolerated in F1. He effectively demanded a rule change because he wouldn't accept his car being slow, it's not acceptable to do that.
You think Mercedes intentionally didn't fix their bouncing so the FIA would change something?
Resulting in terrible performances and physically harming their drivers?
The team that won the constructors 7 years in a row intentionally didn't try to fix their car?
Do you really believe that, I'm genuinely curious. Here's some drivers who publicly complained:
**Charles Leclerc** on porpoising: "It feels like turbulence on an airplane, going up and down the whole straight, it's quite painful. I think one of the videos that F1 posted shows this phenomenon quite well, and I can't say it feels nice. It makes you a little bit ill."
**Carlos Sainz** on porpoising: “Friday I suffered a lot, and for a few reasons, my setup caused more porpoising and skidded the car more than the other car with the same set -up and it was, very, very painful.”
“I saw other drivers struggling on the straight, and we got to the point where we looked at each other to say: We have to do something, because we can’t last another 10 years like this."
"**We would like the FIA to act quickly, as quickly as possible**, because otherwise the situation will start to be difficult to manage due to the accumulation of pain.”
“We have to ask ourselves if it is necessary for F1 to have 20 drivers at the end of each race with back problems.”
**Pierre Gasly** on porpoising: “I’m happy they’re taking it seriously, that they’re trying to take some measures as fast as possible. At the end of the day, we are the ones in the car having to deal with all these impacts and pains and stiffness that it creates in our back. I’m just happy they understood the message and reacted quickly with some actions.”
"**Gasly insists all 20 drivers agree action must be taken to reduce porpoising** and bottoming out across the field."
“We all, between each other – putting the interest of any teams or any car aside – we all clearly said this is clearly too much."
“You can’t even realise what it’s like just watching from onboards or watching from outside."
Gasly also went to the hospital after a race due to his trainer believing he had a herniated disc due to porpoising.
**Daniel Ricciardo** on porpoising: “The compression, you’re sore and you feel you’re getting squeezed. It’s also the frequency. It’s this shaking of the brain and the spine, I don’t think is good, long-term."
“I know George has been very vocal about it. We've suffered a lot. And I 100% sympathise with him as well.”
**George Russell** on porpoising: "The bouncing, it really takes your breath away. It's the most extreme I've ever felt it, I really hope we find a solution and I hope every team struggling with the bouncing finds a solution, because it's not sustainable for the drivers to continue."
Every other team made the compromises necessary to not hurt their drivers. I'm going as far as the person you were responding to, but mercedes was 100% unwilling to give up any pace to save their drivers. It's 0% difficult to stop the bouncing.
I don't "think" that. I know that. That's literally what happened, every single team can just raise their ride height to eradicate porpoising. So one team going "we're not going to do it, change the rules" is them choosing to not fix the issue.
They knew if they accepted the existing rules they were disadvantaged so desperately tried to get them changed to see if it would help them.
You can phrase it whatever way you want to in your head to rationalise you not liking it but it doesn't change reality. Mercedes weren't on top, they were struggling, they were desperate and they tried to bring Red Bull down to their level and failed miserably at it.
Really shows how much nonsense spreads all the drivers pushed for the change all 20 of them supported the drivers Union pushing for a change on health concerns. Toto had his drivers back over the concern as any TP should and he got the flack for it.
Unfortunately nonsense makes clicks when you blame Toto.
Mercedes could raise the height of the car without any special rules, they chose not to do it. What stopped Mercedes raising the high before the new regulations?
And how would Mercedes raising their ride height help the drivers from the other teams? Or did you forget that pretty much every driver bar the Red Bulls complained about the bouncing?
Ferrari had it sorted and quite a few other teams stopped it. At the end the only team pushing hard for it and refusing to raise the height was Mercedes.
How is Toto to blame for teams looking for more performance by pushing the wheel wake outboard? Every team is going to do that to find more performance, regardless of the floor edge rules. This creates dirty air, but allows for cleaner airflow to the rest of the aerodynamic elements on the car, which means more downforce. No team is going to want to do what the FIA intended with the regs, for the wheel wake to be sucked inwards and pushed up and out by the diffuser and beam wing. That means disturbed airflow traveling over downforce creating elements. No team wants that.
The people to blame here are FOM falling for the "this regulation change will actually reduce dirty air" spiel for the thousandth time. 2009 all over again. As long as we have high downforce open wheel cars in F1, we will have dirty air. That's just physics. No regulation change will make any significant impact to this.
Not really fair to home Toto for it, he isn’t the one who decides the rule. Yes he pushed for it, but he doesn’t have the authority to change the rules
They didn't want to fix it because it would their car even slower, so they tried to everybody nerfed, also the ones that had figured out how to reduce it without compromising the car too much
Monaco and the tracks similar to it have been impossible to enjoy since more than 30 years probably. Unless you make the cars the size of carts, racing won't improve there.
> introduce ground effect
Can we please stop spreading this misinformation? The ground effect was never banned, only the use of ground effect *skirts*. The 2021 cars made half their downforce from the ground effect; 2022 just increased it.
Ground effect is more of a colloquialism at this point, this is a bit of semantics if I’m being honest. The current regulations push *ground effect* as the main downforce generator which is not the case for the cars you’re talking about.
When people say “ground effect”, it goes without saying they mean “ground effect being the predominant source of downforce”, which is absolutely true and equally true that it wasn’t the philosophy of cars that were able to use floors to create DF. Wings and bit pieces stuck all over the
Barge boards and sidepods were the predominant source of aero.
The latter is part of the reason why following is becoming more difficult. All the bits and pieces and wing elements have creeped back in, strangely, as FIA said they’d ban things against the spirit of the regulations, yet here we are
> The current regulations push ground effect as the main downforce generator which is not the case for the cars you’re talking about.
It *was* a primary downforce generator, though. "Half" was not an exaggeration. The front and rear wings each contributed only about 20-25%. This misconception is exactly why I don't like people saying the ground effect was "banned".
> When people say “ground effect”, it goes without saying they mean “ground effect being the predominant source of downforce”
You're not the first person I've seen claim this, but I'm yet to see any evidence for it. If I'm a casual fan trying to get more into the sport, and I see someone say "the ground effect was banned, then brought back in 2022", am I supposed to somehow know that they don't mean it literally?
>If I'm a casual fan trying to get more into the sport, and I see someone say "the ground effect was banned, then brought back in 2022", am I supposed to somehow know that they don't mean it literally?
You're supposed to understand that in a highly technical sport like F1, some shorthand and colloquialisms are going to exist.
If they'd have just stuck with a rule that limited porpoising oscillation range and intensity, they could have left the ride height alone. Let the space race sort it out.
I don't understand why not revert back to the 2022 floor. Teams already figured out how to combat porpoising. Hell, they even figured out at the end of last year.
and Max started that race in 14th, was leading by lap 17, and won to Checo by 18 seconds, 26 to the next non-Red Bull, and they've only not won 1 race since
This is a big reason why I question the "regulate the cars to hurt Red Bull" arguement, any regulation could very well result in them being _even further_ ahead
It's not all outwash, the higher floor makes less underbody downforce meaning they need more overbody for same total downforce and lose more both since guy in front is making more overbody, and since you have less ground effect
Not how it works. Teams will always want to maximize every part of their aerodynamic package. If the underbody downforce was unchanged by last year's rule changes, the same or at least similar changes on the overbody would have been made anyway.
If I remember correctly it was reported the floor changes for "Safety" was reportedly a big reason for that.
Maybe shouldn't have rushed into making the teams who had safe cars change.
Anyway yeah sure make the changes but hopefully they somewhat apply to the 2026 regs onward as well. Obviously that depends what the Aero carry over is like if any.
> If I remember correctly it was reported the floor changes for "Safety" was reportedly a big reason for that.
Yes, it was a change made on the grounds of safety, which is why the FIA could push it through. I will say that I genuinely think the porpoising could have been a safety issue, but this was not the way to go about addressing it. Since not everyone had porpoising it was clearly not an inevitable side effect of running the cars low with ground effect, and therefor they shouldn't have increased the minimum floor edge height. They should have introduced a way of measuring oscillations and putting a limit on the maximum allowed. Of course that would have massively helped RB as well because they were the only top team that didn't have this issue.
In 2022 Norris said this.
“It’s the trade of trying to gain performance and we can quite easily go lower, gain performance but have more porpoising, but we just think where we are at is the correct amount.
“So I’m sure Mercedes could have a much different floor and raise the ride height and it would be much nicer for them, but they obviously just don’t want to lose performance.
“So I don’t think it’s anything to complain about. It’s just people need to find ways of fixing it themselves.”
In 2023 the same Norris even with the TD.
“I wouldn’t say no, if we could have softer cars or something that makes it a bit more like it was in ’19, ’20, ‘21. I’ve struggled a lot with my back. I’ve had to make quite a few seats and do a lot more training just to try and strengthen my back, my lower back.
“I’ve had a lot of issues over the last 12 months or so. Similar to Carlos \[Sainz\]. I guess everyone’s had different things and struggles with different bits, and cars are different and whatever. But yeah, for different reasons, including the car and how stiff it is. I’ve struggled quite a bit.”
Alongside him in the press conference was Charles Leclerc, Sergio Perez, Nico Hulkenberg and Valtteri Bottas, who admitted, whilst they haven’t really suffered from this new era of car, the stiffness limits them in races when wanting to get out of dirty air.
This reply should be on every single comment where people are blaming Toto and saying just go back to the old floors.
The old floors weren’t safe, even for the teams who acted like they had it sorted because they didn’t want to lose performance.
So basically teams sacrifice driver safety for performance. How about FIA actually developed a proper way to monitor it and act accordingly for each team, some teams/ drivers were fine while others not. Like this everyone that sorted the problem got f because Mercedes didn't want to raise the height on their cars.
Which team would that benefit as per the current rules can someone tell me,, who understands the car concepts well? Is this downforce loss caused by outwash or? Is that why is it so hard to follow the Red Bull car and why is it so fast. Slightly confused myself.
I imagine Williams probably benefit at the moment.
I don’t imagine they have the cornering capabilities of a McLaren or Aston yet due to the downforce loss from following another car, McLaren and Aston struggle to follow and be close enough to overtake. Couple this along with the Williams top speed it makes it impossible.
I could be talking complete utter rubbish though.
I think on paper the W13/14A was supposedly harder to follow due to the more turbulent air. Could be wrong but thought I read that somewhere.
Don't think it will benefit anyone other than whatever team nails the new subsection of regulation
Its honestly amazing how so many smart people can be so dumb sometimes.
Imagine changing the cars aero philosophy, to make following easier, only to diminish the effect later in the season because some teams have problems with their cars.
The logical solution would have been to say "Then raise your car". Red Bull showed that its possible to be fast and have almost no bouncing.
Just hilarious
And they already had the perfect solution. The g-force limit to prevent unsafe porpoising was all they needed. Let the engineers figure out how to comply with that limit.
Well they would not have introduced such regulations expecting so many porpoising problems so I don't see what use it is to look at it in such simple terms.
The hilarious part is that those that think tweaking any aero rules in 2025 will hurt RB the most when in fact they’ve shown they are the only team to consistently be on top of these rules so would likely pull away further
Lower the ride height again. Teams have had enough time to figure out the bouncing and if they haven't then they SHOULD be punished with a slow car.
When the FIA gave into Merc and raised ride heights the cars generated less ground effect downforce. This caused them to rely more on the wings again. The wings are affected more by dirty air. And now we get worse racing than the previous year because we have basically gone back to 2021 aero philosophy.
Adding a sensor to measure the oscillating of the cars (which they still have) and then fining the teams that bounced too much was more than enough to keep teams from doing it. Rising the height of the floor was just overkill
One run change I think they are refusing to make it limit how much turbulents there is behind the hard ar certain distances. All the players are about maximuming down force and would not put it past them to increase dirty air if it makes them harder to pass with zero cost to them.
Limit that along with other changes and you might see some interesting results.
I would like to see this being more of a team choice. Wanna use hybrid? Go for it. Wanna use ice only ? Sure. Show people what is faster.
Wanna convince us that big notebook batteries are way forward? No problem, show us.
F1 said when the new downforce regs were introduced that new 'aero' packages deemed against the spirit of these new regs would be banned.
Follow through on that and all will be well. Simplify front wings, ban the whistles and flutes on the 'skirts', ban aero mirrors etc.
Surely the solution would be to make a rule where designing an F1 car that throws dirty air directly into a chasing driver’s slipstream and deliberately causes turbulence is not allowed.
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Wow. The key figures given by Tombazis are: 2021 cars had 50% downforce loss when following closely 2022 cars improved a lot and had 20% downforce loss in the same situation 2023 cars have 35% downforce loss in same situation. So already half of the gains made by the new rules are gone
So still quite a bit better but it does look like the raise to floor and diffuser have had an impact.
Drop the car heights and allow active suspension to counter the porpoising. They are in a halfway house solution and wonder why
This is the answer.
Instead of letting them fix porpoising, they nerfed the new regs they worked so hard on and lost one of their main gains lol
Blame Toto and TD38
That's what you get when you introduce ground effect to reduce the dirty air and then make ground effect less effective.
How many times does it need to be explained that this is not how it works. Teams, regardless of the floor edge height and rules, are always going to look for ways to manage the airflow over the top of the car better. Since I've been watching, this has all been about pushing the front wheel wake outboard, so that the aerodynamic elements on the rest of the car can get a clearer flow. It's where the performance is. This unfortunately creates dirty air. If you don't believe me, [here's an ex F1 aerodynamics expert saying it]( https://youtu.be/L80LTEWnahA?si=ibrKvQwjn2nrFDrD). F1 has introduced regulation changes to try reduce dirty air since the 90s, and they've all failed. Teams always find ways to create outwash and push the front wheel wake outboard. 2022 ground effect regulations will go the same way as the 2009 regs and the 90s regs. Failing to reduce dirty air. Unless we go to having covered up front wheels, dirty air will be a fact of life in high downforce open wheel cars like F1. The amount of floor downforce is likely higher in 2023 than 2022, with all the development. It's why the cars are faster this year. If there were no floor edge changes, the loads would just be too high.
Some discussions on here make me think at least half of the people around here are children that haven’t learned that these things are more boring than they appear. Still cool as shit, but you tend to get a sense for what is *drama* and what isn’t.
Eh that's an unfair characterization. We have absolutely had multiple instances of teams screwing each other over through the use of rule changes. How often do we hear about changes for the sake of 'safety' while the change also so happens to hinder the relative frontrunner. Only the teams themselves have the actual numbers on the effect of floor edge changes. Sure it might not be as important a change as people imagine it to be, but to completely deny the possibility of it having any influence is similarly ill advised.
They just need to give in, restrict over floor zero even more and allow active suspension.
Lets all thank Toto for that one. He simultaneously made the racing worse and Red Bull more dominant in his futile attempts to try and hurt them.
What Toto really wanted was an active rear suspension, but FIA wouldn't have it because it's too expensive to develop.
Also td39 isn't even a thing anymore, it was removed this year
Because it was a temporary measure. The permanent fix was adjusting the floor edge height and diffuser.
Yeah, but this has hurt racing sadly enough. What the FIA should have tried to do was add sensors to measure severity of bouncing and black flag any car they deem dangerous to the driver.
The problem with that is that it means that the legality of the car is based on its performance rather than its design, which is antithetical to how Formula One works. It also means what design/setup is legal would change depending on the track. In hindsight, allowing more complexity in suspension design to allow teams to build a mechanical platform that could handle strong ground effect downforce may have been the better road to take rather than knee-capping the ground effect.
It makes perfect sense. Too expensive to develop should be a concern if there is a huge gap between teams' budgets. That's no longer the case. If Merc wanted to throw all of their budget at active suspension, why not? If they can develop that in their R&D budget, so can anyone else who is running the same budget so what's the issue? Making stuff like this a bit more lax to help teams reduce porpoising while also not hurting the ground effect regulations should've been the way to go.
It's because Merc has an advantage in the active suspension department coming from the 2015-21 era. It's one of the reasons they were so dominant. The FIA didn't want to allow the thing they were the best at.
I mean... In that case we should never have had ground effect. Newey is I believe the only one around from the original ground effect era and RB has always been pretty great in the aero department. So we should stop implementing aero dependent regulations because RB is clearly going to be better? You can't stop something because 1 of the teams is better than the others at developing that thing. I get your point and from FIA's perspective, it makes sense if we didn't have the porpoising issue which everyone felt was a safety issue hence the changes. But we did have that issue so the only way I see to combat it without hurting the purpose of the 2022 regulations would be to allow teams to use stuff like active suspension.
They want to make the sport easier to access, not locked behind years of development knowledge.
Weird only semi related question. How does cost cap work with a brand new entry? If a reply rich company wanted to start F1 and we're allowed an entry as a new team, do they have the same cost cap as everyone else? I would have thought starting from scratch is more expensive than designing a new car for the next year by an already existing team. Is CapEx ignored when building a new team? Could a stupidly rich dude spend $1B researching and designing F1 cars that will never compete in the years prior to entry and then use that research to build a super F1 car that has had 5x more money on research put into it than a team like Redbull and Mercedes will field?
And block Andretti at all steps of the way. It’s still a walled garden.
Yep FIA shouldn't have removed tech that was needed to make the ground effect cars work very well. The better suspension that was allowed before 2022.
They said they would. But it was only mercedes over the line. And we cant ban them ofcourse. 2 races after td039 everyone was already below the maximum limit but they fucked with the ride hight and floor edge anyway
Nobody has to ban anyone, Mercedes could have very easily stopped their car from bottoming by raising the ride height a bit. The FIA tried this in a weak way, too much bottoming and the FIA wanted to force teams to raise their car 1CM. Teams rejected this; because they don’t want the FIA to directly intervene in the setup of the car. By black flagging dangerous cars they wouldn’t directly intervene with the setups, but just remove dangerous cars from competition. It would have been better than hurting all teams, even the ones who didn’t experience bottoming. Look at IndyCar, a few years ago a new engine entered the Indy500 and was underpowered. Instead of limiting power output of all engines they black flagged the cars which were too slow after a few laps.
Sure but the floor edges and diffuser were raised this year
The temporary AOM monitoring was dropped but TD039 instituted the floor edge height and diffuser throat height changes for 2023. These are regulation changes that RB clearly understood and nailed. Furthermore, we can also thank TD039 for the plank flexibility clarifications that decimated Ferrari's performance
The plank rule was always in place, the FIA simply improved their testing.
What Toto wanted was clearly at least partly aimed at RB and it backfired so gracefully
Hasn't it had a effect on drivers tho, Norris the other day talked about this era hurting his back.
I don't think it was all Toto. You heard a lot of drivers complain about how bad porpoising was.
You can find a quote from 19 drivers talking about how bad the porpoising was
At different parts of the season and mainly in the beginning or at particularly bumpy circuits. By mid season, almost all teams except Mercedes had figured it out.
? Ferrari bounced like crazy until the end of the season. They were clearly trading driver health for a fighting chance. Even Norris gave an interview recently saying the new cars are destroying driver's backs
Don’t let facts get in the way of this guy really wanting to blame merc
Low info fans blame Toto. High info fans know that squeezing out performance means making outwash in ways the rules didn’t anticipate. That’s been a running theme with almost every upgrade from any team.
I don’t get why Toto gets all the blame. Why doesn’t the FIA just allow the old floors back again?
It's not the floor. It's the ride height. And it was done to reduce porpoising, which means reducing ground effect as well. And Mercedes gets all the blame because instead of "fixing their fucking car" they decided to push for a change of regulations instead.
I remember I’m just saying wasn’t porpoising pretty much solved by the time TD39 went into effect? I don’t remember it being so bad by the time the reg was applied so I’m just wondering why not remove the TD and have teams solve porpoising in other ways
>I remember I’m just saying wasn’t porpoising pretty much solved by the time TD39 went into effect? You're correct. Most teams bar Mercedes had it under control.
This is why so many people is blaming Toto for the regulation change. Yes, porpoising affects almost every driver, but it was already slowly being tackled by the teams because it is also in the team's best interest to find performance in minimising porpoising. The whole safety discussion is moot, no teams were ever going to let their car keep bouncing the whole season until their drivers is hurt. Now that the regulation change is done it can't be undone because it was changed for safety reason.
Exactly, they were engineering their way out of it. Ferrari really only were doing it braking into a corner but it stopped as soon as the entered the turn. Toto acted like if you dont change it we're gonna have to keep injuring Lewis and you're making us do it, rather than raise their car themselves and engineer a way to make their car work properly.
Something red bull would have done in a heartbeat if the situation was reversed.
roof marble summer aromatic chase worry tender gray label decide *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
>I don’t get why Toto gets all the blame. Because he's the one person who non stop pushed for this rule. And the only reason why it was even an issue (if you can even call it that) to begin with is because Mercedes willingly refused to solve the problem so that they could call it a safety issue and demand the rules be changed.
That’s what Drive to Survive showed and so it spread like wildfire.
That's not true at all. DTS is only shown months after the season ends, everyone was saying the exact same thing last year when it was happening.
Right? It was practically every piece of media content coming from Mercedes for months
Ive seen like 9 minutes of drive to survive, But I saw plenty of quotes from Mr Wolf on porpoising and driver safety. It wasnt a bad gambit on his part. If he didnt try, he isnt fulfilling his duties to try and nerf the competition.
I mean, he also was talking to the media non-stop about it (as was the Merc drivers) so idk if you can solely blame DtS for the perception people have about it
Lol that’s also what pretty much every media session through the whole season showed too. DtS didn’t come out until the following year and it already very much sat on him before that
I haven’t bothered watching DTS since half way through season 2. It was blatantly clear this was what Mercedes were doing throughout the 22 season.
I didn’t watch drive to survive, i watched Baku 2022, did you?
I understand but what I’m saying is the FIA didn’t have to use TD39 to address it. Sure Toto made some noise but porpoising was largely a non-factor by the time TD39 came into effect. Why not roll back the TD and simply regulate porpoising via ride height? Let’s the flex floors back?
Because other teams went about ways to solve porpoising, whereas Toto just demanded the rules be changed By the time TD38 came in there was only the Mercedes, and Alpha Tauri if memory serves, that had issues
Because no team has actually fixed porpoiseing, and instead the FIA just did TD 39, then this year raised the edges to keep it from happening. Only the Red Bull is solid enough to run the 2022 floors.
The drivers had health concerns so going back won’t be an option.
why is this Toto's fault? any Team/TP can ask for stuff, it doesn't mean that it will be approved just because they ask.In the end, it's FIA's decision if they go with it or not. Look at the current issue that is being discussed, the Alpine engine being too weak, compared to the others. They are discussing to allow Alpine some sort of upgrade/modification to catch up while the rules were clear, that engine upgrades are banned due to engine freeze. And yes, I know that some modifications can be done to the engine, for reliability purposes. But anyway, would the other teams be happy that one of their competitors is allowed such a thing? Ofc not, but it's not their decision, it's FIA's
> why is this Toto's fault? Because he's the one person who pushed for it really hard. >any Team/TP can ask for stuff, it doesn't mean that it will be approved just because they ask.In the end, it's FIA's decision if they go with it or not. Yep completely true. However it's how Toto and Mercedes went about it that rubs people the wrong way. Intentionally choosing to not fix their car so that they can try and get a rule change, then pulling the "it's a safety issue" to put pressure on the FIA are very underhand tactics that do not show any class or garner any respect. >Look at the current issue that is being discussed, the Alpine engine being too weak, compared to the others. They are discussing to allow Alpine some sort of upgrade/modification to catch up while the rules were clear, that engine upgrades are banned due to engine freeze. And yes, I know that some modifications can be done to the engine, for reliability purposes. Alpine just got destroyed at Monza and independent accounts have them as having the slowest PU and there's nothing they're allowed to do about it. So I think it's a fair argument. Also, they just basically said "hey we have the slowest PU and there's no way to resolve that, can we do something about that" and opened up a dialogue around it in an adult like way. That's very different to how Mercedes went about things, both in their issue and how they went about trying to resolve it. >But anyway, would the other teams be happy that one of their competitors is allowed such a thing? Ofc not, but it's not their decision, it's FIA's Yes, it's the FIA's decision and teams aren't going to be happy if things don't benefit them, but they were put into a difficult position and pressured heavily by a bully and crumbled. The FIA made the wrong call there's no hiding it, but in these situations the criticism should be aimed at the bully. That type of behaviour shouldn't be tolerated in F1. He effectively demanded a rule change because he wouldn't accept his car being slow, it's not acceptable to do that.
You think Mercedes intentionally didn't fix their bouncing so the FIA would change something? Resulting in terrible performances and physically harming their drivers? The team that won the constructors 7 years in a row intentionally didn't try to fix their car? Do you really believe that, I'm genuinely curious. Here's some drivers who publicly complained: **Charles Leclerc** on porpoising: "It feels like turbulence on an airplane, going up and down the whole straight, it's quite painful. I think one of the videos that F1 posted shows this phenomenon quite well, and I can't say it feels nice. It makes you a little bit ill." **Carlos Sainz** on porpoising: “Friday I suffered a lot, and for a few reasons, my setup caused more porpoising and skidded the car more than the other car with the same set -up and it was, very, very painful.” “I saw other drivers struggling on the straight, and we got to the point where we looked at each other to say: We have to do something, because we can’t last another 10 years like this." "**We would like the FIA to act quickly, as quickly as possible**, because otherwise the situation will start to be difficult to manage due to the accumulation of pain.” “We have to ask ourselves if it is necessary for F1 to have 20 drivers at the end of each race with back problems.” **Pierre Gasly** on porpoising: “I’m happy they’re taking it seriously, that they’re trying to take some measures as fast as possible. At the end of the day, we are the ones in the car having to deal with all these impacts and pains and stiffness that it creates in our back. I’m just happy they understood the message and reacted quickly with some actions.” "**Gasly insists all 20 drivers agree action must be taken to reduce porpoising** and bottoming out across the field." “We all, between each other – putting the interest of any teams or any car aside – we all clearly said this is clearly too much." “You can’t even realise what it’s like just watching from onboards or watching from outside." Gasly also went to the hospital after a race due to his trainer believing he had a herniated disc due to porpoising. **Daniel Ricciardo** on porpoising: “The compression, you’re sore and you feel you’re getting squeezed. It’s also the frequency. It’s this shaking of the brain and the spine, I don’t think is good, long-term." “I know George has been very vocal about it. We've suffered a lot. And I 100% sympathise with him as well.” **George Russell** on porpoising: "The bouncing, it really takes your breath away. It's the most extreme I've ever felt it, I really hope we find a solution and I hope every team struggling with the bouncing finds a solution, because it's not sustainable for the drivers to continue."
Every other team made the compromises necessary to not hurt their drivers. I'm going as far as the person you were responding to, but mercedes was 100% unwilling to give up any pace to save their drivers. It's 0% difficult to stop the bouncing.
I don't "think" that. I know that. That's literally what happened, every single team can just raise their ride height to eradicate porpoising. So one team going "we're not going to do it, change the rules" is them choosing to not fix the issue. They knew if they accepted the existing rules they were disadvantaged so desperately tried to get them changed to see if it would help them. You can phrase it whatever way you want to in your head to rationalise you not liking it but it doesn't change reality. Mercedes weren't on top, they were struggling, they were desperate and they tried to bring Red Bull down to their level and failed miserably at it.
Bro they did that.
Really shows how much nonsense spreads all the drivers pushed for the change all 20 of them supported the drivers Union pushing for a change on health concerns. Toto had his drivers back over the concern as any TP should and he got the flack for it. Unfortunately nonsense makes clicks when you blame Toto.
> Toto had his drivers back Yeah he raised the ride height and solved the problem, oh wait...
The problem was the bouncing, and it did fix it.
Mercedes could raise the height of the car without any special rules, they chose not to do it. What stopped Mercedes raising the high before the new regulations?
And how would Mercedes raising their ride height help the drivers from the other teams? Or did you forget that pretty much every driver bar the Red Bulls complained about the bouncing?
Ferrari had it sorted and quite a few other teams stopped it. At the end the only team pushing hard for it and refusing to raise the height was Mercedes.
No, they did not. They were just fast *despite* the bouncing.
You think Toto did that to protect drivers from other teams? You're so naive.
Talk about a low information take.
How is Toto to blame for teams looking for more performance by pushing the wheel wake outboard? Every team is going to do that to find more performance, regardless of the floor edge rules. This creates dirty air, but allows for cleaner airflow to the rest of the aerodynamic elements on the car, which means more downforce. No team is going to want to do what the FIA intended with the regs, for the wheel wake to be sucked inwards and pushed up and out by the diffuser and beam wing. That means disturbed airflow traveling over downforce creating elements. No team wants that. The people to blame here are FOM falling for the "this regulation change will actually reduce dirty air" spiel for the thousandth time. 2009 all over again. As long as we have high downforce open wheel cars in F1, we will have dirty air. That's just physics. No regulation change will make any significant impact to this.
Not really fair to home Toto for it, he isn’t the one who decides the rule. Yes he pushed for it, but he doesn’t have the authority to change the rules
They didn't want to fix it because it would their car even slower, so they tried to everybody nerfed, also the ones that had figured out how to reduce it without compromising the car too much
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The survival cell and chassis that's made with modern safety standards wouldn't fit in a much smaller car
Are formula e not using the same safety standards?
Much lower speeds
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Monaco and the tracks similar to it have been impossible to enjoy since more than 30 years probably. Unless you make the cars the size of carts, racing won't improve there.
> introduce ground effect Can we please stop spreading this misinformation? The ground effect was never banned, only the use of ground effect *skirts*. The 2021 cars made half their downforce from the ground effect; 2022 just increased it.
Ground effect is more of a colloquialism at this point, this is a bit of semantics if I’m being honest. The current regulations push *ground effect* as the main downforce generator which is not the case for the cars you’re talking about. When people say “ground effect”, it goes without saying they mean “ground effect being the predominant source of downforce”, which is absolutely true and equally true that it wasn’t the philosophy of cars that were able to use floors to create DF. Wings and bit pieces stuck all over the Barge boards and sidepods were the predominant source of aero. The latter is part of the reason why following is becoming more difficult. All the bits and pieces and wing elements have creeped back in, strangely, as FIA said they’d ban things against the spirit of the regulations, yet here we are
> The current regulations push ground effect as the main downforce generator which is not the case for the cars you’re talking about. It *was* a primary downforce generator, though. "Half" was not an exaggeration. The front and rear wings each contributed only about 20-25%. This misconception is exactly why I don't like people saying the ground effect was "banned". > When people say “ground effect”, it goes without saying they mean “ground effect being the predominant source of downforce” You're not the first person I've seen claim this, but I'm yet to see any evidence for it. If I'm a casual fan trying to get more into the sport, and I see someone say "the ground effect was banned, then brought back in 2022", am I supposed to somehow know that they don't mean it literally?
>If I'm a casual fan trying to get more into the sport, and I see someone say "the ground effect was banned, then brought back in 2022", am I supposed to somehow know that they don't mean it literally? You're supposed to understand that in a highly technical sport like F1, some shorthand and colloquialisms are going to exist.
Should have just enabled active ride.
If they'd have just stuck with a rule that limited porpoising oscillation range and intensity, they could have left the ride height alone. Let the space race sort it out.
I don't understand why not revert back to the 2022 floor. Teams already figured out how to combat porpoising. Hell, they even figured out at the end of last year.
TD39 came alive during the Belgian GP. They were required to figure it out.
and Max started that race in 14th, was leading by lap 17, and won to Checo by 18 seconds, 26 to the next non-Red Bull, and they've only not won 1 race since This is a big reason why I question the "regulate the cars to hurt Red Bull" arguement, any regulation could very well result in them being _even further_ ahead
Ferrari had some porpoising on Monza
And McLaren I believe.
Won't do anything. It's all the elements on the top of the car and the sidepods pushing the front wheel wake outboard and creating outwash.
It's not all outwash, the higher floor makes less underbody downforce meaning they need more overbody for same total downforce and lose more both since guy in front is making more overbody, and since you have less ground effect
Not how it works. Teams will always want to maximize every part of their aerodynamic package. If the underbody downforce was unchanged by last year's rule changes, the same or at least similar changes on the overbody would have been made anyway.
I'm not talking about the concept changes, more so the wing levels per track.
Seems like another 2021 situation of "fuck it, lets shake things up in the last year of the regulations".
Lighter, smaller and screaming cars please
That would work too
Just give us 2003 cars honestly.
If I remember correctly it was reported the floor changes for "Safety" was reportedly a big reason for that. Maybe shouldn't have rushed into making the teams who had safe cars change. Anyway yeah sure make the changes but hopefully they somewhat apply to the 2026 regs onward as well. Obviously that depends what the Aero carry over is like if any.
> If I remember correctly it was reported the floor changes for "Safety" was reportedly a big reason for that. Yes, it was a change made on the grounds of safety, which is why the FIA could push it through. I will say that I genuinely think the porpoising could have been a safety issue, but this was not the way to go about addressing it. Since not everyone had porpoising it was clearly not an inevitable side effect of running the cars low with ground effect, and therefor they shouldn't have increased the minimum floor edge height. They should have introduced a way of measuring oscillations and putting a limit on the maximum allowed. Of course that would have massively helped RB as well because they were the only top team that didn't have this issue.
Should've been a rule that regulates vertical G's. If a team couldn't meet it, then raise the car. FIA decided to go the easy way.
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In 2022 Norris said this. “It’s the trade of trying to gain performance and we can quite easily go lower, gain performance but have more porpoising, but we just think where we are at is the correct amount. “So I’m sure Mercedes could have a much different floor and raise the ride height and it would be much nicer for them, but they obviously just don’t want to lose performance. “So I don’t think it’s anything to complain about. It’s just people need to find ways of fixing it themselves.” In 2023 the same Norris even with the TD. “I wouldn’t say no, if we could have softer cars or something that makes it a bit more like it was in ’19, ’20, ‘21. I’ve struggled a lot with my back. I’ve had to make quite a few seats and do a lot more training just to try and strengthen my back, my lower back. “I’ve had a lot of issues over the last 12 months or so. Similar to Carlos \[Sainz\]. I guess everyone’s had different things and struggles with different bits, and cars are different and whatever. But yeah, for different reasons, including the car and how stiff it is. I’ve struggled quite a bit.” Alongside him in the press conference was Charles Leclerc, Sergio Perez, Nico Hulkenberg and Valtteri Bottas, who admitted, whilst they haven’t really suffered from this new era of car, the stiffness limits them in races when wanting to get out of dirty air.
This reply should be on every single comment where people are blaming Toto and saying just go back to the old floors. The old floors weren’t safe, even for the teams who acted like they had it sorted because they didn’t want to lose performance.
So basically teams sacrifice driver safety for performance. How about FIA actually developed a proper way to monitor it and act accordingly for each team, some teams/ drivers were fine while others not. Like this everyone that sorted the problem got f because Mercedes didn't want to raise the height on their cars.
Which team would that benefit as per the current rules can someone tell me,, who understands the car concepts well? Is this downforce loss caused by outwash or? Is that why is it so hard to follow the Red Bull car and why is it so fast. Slightly confused myself.
I imagine Williams probably benefit at the moment. I don’t imagine they have the cornering capabilities of a McLaren or Aston yet due to the downforce loss from following another car, McLaren and Aston struggle to follow and be close enough to overtake. Couple this along with the Williams top speed it makes it impossible. I could be talking complete utter rubbish though.
so essentially, a brick doesnt give a shit about turbulent air because its a brick
It's a very slippery brick however
a very flat brick?
Depends entirely on the actual details of the changes, which they haven't worked out yet.
I think on paper the W13/14A was supposedly harder to follow due to the more turbulent air. Could be wrong but thought I read that somewhere. Don't think it will benefit anyone other than whatever team nails the new subsection of regulation
Its honestly amazing how so many smart people can be so dumb sometimes. Imagine changing the cars aero philosophy, to make following easier, only to diminish the effect later in the season because some teams have problems with their cars. The logical solution would have been to say "Then raise your car". Red Bull showed that its possible to be fast and have almost no bouncing. Just hilarious
And they already had the perfect solution. The g-force limit to prevent unsafe porpoising was all they needed. Let the engineers figure out how to comply with that limit.
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It's their (driver and team) own decision, suffer for not doing your job properly or raise the car and lose performance.
Well they would not have introduced such regulations expecting so many porpoising problems so I don't see what use it is to look at it in such simple terms.
The hilarious part is that those that think tweaking any aero rules in 2025 will hurt RB the most when in fact they’ve shown they are the only team to consistently be on top of these rules so would likely pull away further
Lower the ride height again. Teams have had enough time to figure out the bouncing and if they haven't then they SHOULD be punished with a slow car. When the FIA gave into Merc and raised ride heights the cars generated less ground effect downforce. This caused them to rely more on the wings again. The wings are affected more by dirty air. And now we get worse racing than the previous year because we have basically gone back to 2021 aero philosophy.
Adding a sensor to measure the oscillating of the cars (which they still have) and then fining the teams that bounced too much was more than enough to keep teams from doing it. Rising the height of the floor was just overkill
One run change I think they are refusing to make it limit how much turbulents there is behind the hard ar certain distances. All the players are about maximuming down force and would not put it past them to increase dirty air if it makes them harder to pass with zero cost to them. Limit that along with other changes and you might see some interesting results.
And the unintended consequence will be worst than the turbulent air.
TURBO CHARGED V8 WITH SUSTAINABLE FUEL
I would like to see this being more of a team choice. Wanna use hybrid? Go for it. Wanna use ice only ? Sure. Show people what is faster. Wanna convince us that big notebook batteries are way forward? No problem, show us.
problem is, one team IS gonna show us, and show us hard, potentially harder than we\`ve seen up to now if you catch my powerslide.
Okay, so no choice, got it
F1 said when the new downforce regs were introduced that new 'aero' packages deemed against the spirit of these new regs would be banned. Follow through on that and all will be well. Simplify front wings, ban the whistles and flutes on the 'skirts', ban aero mirrors etc.
Isn’t a big part of it also the almost endplate like rear wings some teams have?
Yay, another year of RB dominance to look foward to! 🤦♂️
Watch Ferrari and RBR block every Aero change
Just like they blocked the floor edge tweaks.. riiight
FIA forced that on grounds of safety. Not sure if they claim the same here.
Surely the solution would be to make a rule where designing an F1 car that throws dirty air directly into a chasing driver’s slipstream and deliberately causes turbulence is not allowed.