Mercedes W13

[SiLo]

They run big wings because they can't work the floor as hard as they want because they need to raise the ride height.

[PhillipM]

Yea if your underfloor is peaky and needs to work at low ride heights, your wings don't really care about ride height, the temporary fix is to raise the floor, lower the downforce it makes and slap bigger wings on for stable downforce at the expense of drag. I don't see that you'd go the other way at all.

[VacuousFlamboyant]

I had been thinking this too (very high downforce floor), but if this were the case the solution to the porpoising issue would be to ‘back off’ on both front and rear wings (to the point that are only used to ‘hit the numbers’ and get balance). The suspension would then get a better time of it (and the porpoising would be reduced).

I don't think this is true. The downforce from the wings is stable, the underfloor aero causes the instability. So backing off the wing downforce (without increasing ride height) does not help for the porpoising. Removing the underfloor downforce would.

It's always a compromise. Ferrari and Redbull sacrificed some of their front wing load since pre-season. I do think it would reduce porpoising as it's strongly related to peak downforce stalling the floor. That being said, that would be fixing the symptoms, not tackling the root cause. Mercedes ran a softer suspension since the early spec in Barcelona tests. I thought it was a setup issue, but clearly they have some ground to cover in this department. If they can prevent it from happening in the first place, that means less compromises.

[GrizzleBoy]

They run big wings because they can't work the floor as hard as they want because they need to raise the ride height.

This doesn't explain why they literally launched the car with barn door/park bench wings though.

They decided to run these wings before anyone even knew porpoising was a thing, during the design phase.

[matteosc]

Extremely interesting video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCerqccJWfM
It somehow confirms what Scrabs said, which is that porpoising is mainly related to suspensions, but it also adds comments about the influence of the aerodynamic and on why it is so difficult to simulate and therefore fix.
Very interesting especially the comment about the interaction between vertical motion and pitch of the car.

[Hoffman900]

Been my thoughts all along but Tim Wright said it much more clearly. Jean-Claude Migeot said as much back at the Barcelona test, but the rest of the media ignored him.

As has been pointed out to me, this is likely why Lewis had higher rear tire pressures, but went so far it made for an oversteering car.

It’s still not a suspension problem as Scarbs said. The suspension can mitigate it, but it’s ultimately an aero problem.

[AR3-GP]

I think it's too simple to say Merc have the most downforce because they are porpoising. Then what's Aston Martin's excuse?

[atanatizante]

So you can stall the Venturi tunnels just to diminish the porpoiseing after all, it seems:

[matteosc]

So you can stall the Venturi tunnels just to diminish the porpoiseing after all, it seems:

Not sure where you are getting your conclusion from.

[GrizzleBoy]

So you can stall the Venturi tunnels just to diminish the porpoiseing after all, it seems:

Not sure where you are getting your conclusion from.

I haven't watched the video, but I've had the same idea a couple pages back.

If you can shape your front/mid aero so that at very high-speed the floor stalls and stops producing suction then porpoising should disappear.

Basically instead of trying to stabilise the strong suction of the floor on the straights, it would surely make more sense to actually try and shed the strong suction instead.

So imo I think people want merc to resolve the wrong half of the porpoising issue.

[f1jcw]

I wonder if you could produce a passive F-Duct, that when the velocity of the air passing through the tunnels it was redirected elsewhere

[AR3-GP]

So you can stall the Venturi tunnels just to diminish the porpoiseing after all, it seems:

Not sure where you are getting your conclusion from.

I haven't watched the video, but I've had the same idea a couple pages back.

If you can shape your front/mid aero so that at very high-speed the floor stalls and stops producing suction then porpoising should disappear.

Basically instead of trying to stabilise the strong suction of the floor on the straights, it would surely make more sense to actually try and shed the strong suction instead.

So imo I think people want merc to resolve the wrong half of the porpoising issue.

and what about the porpoising in the corners? What good is a stalled floor then?

[matteosc]

So you can stall the Venturi tunnels just to diminish the porpoiseing after all, it seems:

Not sure where you are getting your conclusion from.

I haven't watched the video, but I've had the same idea a couple pages back.

If you can shape your front/mid aero so that at very high-speed the floor stalls and stops producing suction then porpoising should disappear.

Basically instead of trying to stabilise the strong suction of the floor on the straights, it would surely make more sense to actually try and shed the strong suction instead.

So imo I think people want merc to resolve the wrong half of the porpoising issue.

I do not think that this is feasible in practice. Stalling the floor at a specific speed requires extremely precise control of the ground clearance, contrary to what happens to the aerodynamic of the top of the car. A minimum change in the car height significantly changes the speed of the air under the floor, so that you risk to stall the floor at every bump.

If you had such control, you would probably not have porpoising in first place.

[atanatizante]

From the above video Peter Wright says porpoising also induce bodywork oscillating adding maybe to the car/ICE frecvency (resonance?) that can lead to break the structures...
Thus all 4 customer PU teams which also have porpoising had to run in lower ICE modes just to diminish the bodywork resonance effect. That's why W13 and these cars are clipping sooner on the straights just to compensate with more harvesting and deployment...

In addition, for raising the ride hight to diminish the porpoiseing they need to compensate the downforce loss with both bringing a barn door rear wing and also with higher levels of AoA. It'll be useful to demonstrate this theory by showing some comparison between the rear wing levels of these 5 customer teams and the rest of the grid...

[SiLo]

They run big wings because they can't work the floor as hard as they want because they need to raise the ride height.

This doesn't explain why they literally launched the car with barn door/park bench wings though.

They decided to run these wings before anyone even knew porpoising was a thing, during the design phase.

It's a launch car, you probably want to run it in high downforce mode initially to make sure its all there. Taking downforce off is easy, adding it on is hard.