The FIA overreacted a bit over porpoising because of a single F1 team, claims 2022 regulations designer

F1’s chief technical officer Pat Symonds felt that the FIA may have "overreacted" regarding the porpoising issues that impacted most teams, but Mercedes in particular.

Videos of Lewis Hamilton's discomfort as he bounced around in his W13 during the 2022 F1 Azerbaijan Grand Prix specifically sparked health concerns that forced the FIA to take some action. The Aerodynamic Oscillation Metric (AOM) was introduced in F1 for this reason, although Symonds believes that these issues were unnecessarily over-exaggerated.

Speaking to Auto Motor und Sport, Symonds said:

“I think they [the FIA] overreacted a bit after Baku. In Baku, we saw the worst effects because a team tried something that didn’t work and then went public quite vociferously. If people hadn’t intervened, the problems would have been solved as well. Most teams now understand how to control bouncing.”

He admitted that these porpoising problems were surprisingly completely unforeseen. He said:

“I have to admit, it wasn’t on our radar. We should have had it, though. We had the means to discover it in advance because we were working with dynamic simulations. We used them, for example, to check what happens when a car spins and gets underinflated. So the type of accident that Mark Webber once had in Valencia. You need special software to do that, and we could have used it to anticipate and understand the bouncing.”

Going into detail regarding what led to the bouncing, Symonds added:

“I should have known too, because I was still working on ground-effect cars. I had simply forgotten about it. Without a doubt, bouncing changed things. Teams had to solve this problem before they could work on their aerodynamics. Bouncing is not a purely aerodynamic problem. There’s also a lot of mechanics involved, for example, suspension stiffness.”

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Mercedes did not think they were in a "bad place" during F1 testing in Barcelona in 2022

Having dominated F1 for eight consecutive seasons, Mercedes had a rather rough start to the 2022 season after the introduction of new technical regulations. Despite the porpoising issues becoming rather apparent during pre-season testing in Barcelona earlier this year, Mercedes' director of trackside engineering Andrew Shovlin admitted that the team still did not realize the extent of their weaknesses and lack of competitiveness at the time.

As reported by Autosport, while talking about F1 testing in Spain, Shovlin said:

“At the time about the best thing you could do was just lift the car off the ground, give up performance and manage it that way. That car was defined much, much earlier in the development programme than the race one package. But the issue… at the time in Barcelona, we thought: ‘We’re not the quickest, but we don’t think we we’re in a bad place’.”

“Because we were expecting to add good performance with that Bahrain package. The issue was that when we fitted it, the porpoising was a whole other level. Most of the performance that we intended to add didn’t materialise because we had to lift the car even further and at that point you couldn’t get rid of the bouncing.”

Mercedes finished the 2022 F1 season third in the constructors' championship but is expected to be significantly more competitive in the upcoming season.