Red Bull underwent 'a lot of expense' that was unnecessary to tackle porpoising, claims Christian Horner

Red Bull Racing boss Christian Horner feels that the changes imposed on teams last season to cure porpoising were rather unnecessary and caused a lot of avoidable expense.

Early last season, cars suffered from bouncing/porpoising and the phenomenon caused quite a lot of discomfort to the drivers. It all came to a head in Baku when Lewis Hamilton was porpoising in such a manner that it left the driver in visible discomfort.

Later, due to complaints from drivers across the grid, including Daniel Ricciardo and Pierre Gasly, FIA intervened and changes were introduced for all cars on the F1 grid — including Red Bull, a team that had dealt with porpoising in the best possible manner.

Looking back at the situation, Red Bull boss Horner feels that those imposed changes led to unnecessary expenditure for his team. He told AMuS:

“I think we have to wait and see, the first snapshot will be testing in Bahrain. It’s a little bit strange, because obviously there was a big push to get all of this changed, and the changes came through around Spa last year. But by the end of the year, there was very little porpoising.”

He added:

"My argument at the time was will it not just get sorted out, which it did. So we’ve gone through quite a lot of expense, for all the teams in a big regulation change that probably wasn’t needed."

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Red Bull's prior experience with Adrian Newey helped

One of the reasons why Red Bull appeared to have such an advantage over the rest of the field was because Adrian Newey was the only designer on the entire grid who had the experience of working on ground effect cars. The veteran knew porpoising would be a factor and designed the car accordingly.

Mercedes boss Toto Wolff also revealed that his team knew porpoising could be a factor but didn't expect the phenomenon to play such a massive role. He said:

“It’s not enough to read in a book how the stock market crash happened or the internet bubble burst. There is an uncanny advantage – and this is something I personally witnessed – to go through the whole cycle.”