Aston Martin have been forced to lose a considerable amount of lap time in order to deal with the ‘porpoising’ issue that has also been causing plenty of trouble at Mercedes during the early stages of the new season. Lewis Hamilton and George Russell have already revealed that the Silver Arrows are struggling to cope with the problem, which results in cars bouncing up and down on long straights due to the ground effect that produces a significant percentage of downforce on the new 2022 cars.
It seems as though Mercedes were affected by ‘porpoising’ to a greater degree than their Constructors’ Championship rivals at pre-season testing and throughout the entire Bahrain Grand Prix weekend. The phenomenon is partly responsible for the German team’s lack of overall pace when compared to the likes of Red Bull and Ferrari, who were almost a second per lap quicker over the course of Sunday’s race at the Bahrain International Circuit.
Aston Martin have also been plagued by the issue since the start of pre-season testing and have been forced to make a painful compromise in order to ease the problem ahead of this weekend’s Saudi Arabian Grand Prix. Their chief technology officer, Andrew Green, has since delivered an ominous warning to Mercedes by revealing that the changes made by the British outfit are costing them around 0.75s per lap.
“I’d say we’re still a way away from solving it the way we’d want to solve it,” said Green. “We’ve had to make quite a few compromises to the car and car setup to be able to run without it.
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“We tried some things [in practice], we tried some things in testing as well, and we’re making good progress. Currently, from where we are now, I’d say we’re probably losing in excess of half a second, probably closer to three quarters of a second because of it.”
Green went on to suggest that Mercedes could be forced to make some fundamental changes to their W13 challenger by insisting that aerodynamic modifications will need to be engineered in order to fully combat the ‘porpoising’ issue. “We know where it’s coming from, and what to do, but it’s quite an involved aerodynamic change to solve the problem,” he added.
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“That’s why it takes a bit of time. We can put patches on it and get rid of bits of it. But to do the whole thing properly, it does require a bit of a rework on the aerodynamics.
“I still think it’s going to be several races before we end up with a solution that gives us the performance we need, and gives us the aerodynamic stability that we need to go with it.
“It’s a balancing act. We can drop the performance of the car, get rid of the porpoising, but that’s no good, really. So we need to try and get both, and that’s where we’re trying to aim for the next event .”
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