PhillipM wrote: ↑18 Feb 2023, 21:02
Cs98 wrote: ↑18 Feb 2023, 18:47
PhillipM wrote: ↑18 Feb 2023, 17:54
No, the lifting of the floor edge was to stop teams running the floor edge along the ground and the safety concerns that came with that. If teams still have porpoising that will be up to them to sort out. Or the FIA will do the same as last year and make them run within limits if they think it's a risk to the drivers.
"was to stop teams running the floor edge along the ground and the safety concerns that came with that". What a convoluted way to say it was to reduce porpoising. If porpoising remains a problem then they will naturally have to change the rules again if they want to maintain credibility re safety. The safety concern hasn't disappeared because we lifted the floor edge a little. That intervention is only useful if it actually solves the problem.
Stopping the teams running the floor edge on the ground was to prevent sudden massive changes in downforce if contact was lost, over kerbs, or spinning, etc. Which is a major safety problem and we've seen how that causes issue with cars and crashes before. Porpoising was a indicator of that so you stop it now before teams start to run on the ragged edge with developments.
I love all these people quoting me that claim floor edges ran close to the ground before and don't even know we had rules specifically forbidding devices that bridged the gap from the floor to the ground under previous regs, along with far more rake - and yet last year we had skates appearing to let teams deliberately run the edges along the ground because of the rule change and regulators not realising they had created a box that allowed it.
They're still going to be close to the floor but now the downforce loss in yaw will be much more gradual because of the raised edge feeding air in. You don't have the risk of a car suddenly just snapping into a spin or suddenly going airborne from a sausage kerb strike causing complete downforce loss.
Skirts were banned for a reason. The floor edge is raised for a reason. That reason isn't to magically hobble RB like most people here seem to be up in arms about. It's not to 'help out the other teams' with porpoising - hell the TD last year made the RB faster because it slowed down Ferrari, etc. Frankly the people I talked at at Mclaren the past couple of weeks think it'll be make RB faster which is why they've gone down the skate route too.
I think that porpoising poses any problem in 2023 is almost impossible. Due to the numerous explanations, we can save ourselves the need to go into how porpoising occurs, but in the end higher ground clearances are a simple and quick solution. It's the same with a diffuser. When the diffuser is reasonably far from the ground a vortex rolls up on either side of the floor. Decreasing ground clearance increases downforce. If you lower the ride height is further, a separation bubble forms but downforce continues to increase. When the ride height gets lowered further, at a certain point, one of the two vortices bursts, resulting in a sudden loss of downforce. In a diffuser two vortices hang on fairly well on the way down, then they burst. When the car gets higher up than to thr ride height where the burst happened, the flow back gets back to a "normal". Hysteresis. By raising the underbody area, it stays in a range where no hysteresis takes place. Since the teams had porpoising under control even without that in 2022, you can pretty much rule out that porpoising will be a problem and make a big appearance.
But I can confirm what you say about Red Bull - I've spoken to various people at Ferrari and Mercedes, as well as McLaren. Everyone told me it's an advantage for Red Bull. Finally, their Venturi ducts were already comparatively higher than Ferrari's and most others' last year, which obviously gives them an experience advantage. But they are also confident that they can make up for that experience advantage.
