For most of the 2010s, Formula 1's biggest on-track problem had nothing to do with engines or tires. It was air. Any car running within a couple of car lengths of the one ahead lost so much downforce in the dirty air coming off the leading car's wings that following closely, let alone attempting a pass, became close to impossible without a straight-line speed advantage. The 2022 regulation overhaul was built specifically to solve that problem, and several seasons on, the data on whether it worked is clear enough to actually evaluate.
What Formula 1's Ground-Effect Rules Actually Changed About Racing
The Problem the New Rules Were Built to Fix
Under the pre-2022 rules, F1 cars generated the bulk of their downforce from front and rear wings and a maze of bargeboards, panels mounted ahead of the sidepods to manage airflow around the car. That approach worked well for a single car in clean air but collapsed when a car followed another closely. Engineers calculated that a 2019-specification car following one car length behind another retained only about 55 percent of its normal downforce, a loss severe enough that the trailing car's tires overheated faster and its driver simply could not commit to a pass through most corners.
The Engineering Fix: Moving Downforce to the Floor
The 2022 rules addressed the problem by fundamentally relocating where a car makes its downforce. Wings and bargeboards were reshaped and simplified, and in their place, the regulations brought back ground effect aerodynamics through venturi tunnels sculpted into the car's floor. As air is forced through the narrowing channel of a venturi tunnel, it speeds up, and under Bernoulli's principle, that increase in velocity produces a sharp drop in pressure beneath the car, effectively pulling the floor toward the track surface.
Because that downforce comes from the floor rather than from wings punching a hole in the air for the car behind to drive through, the effect on a following car is far less destructive. A 2022-specification car following another closely retains up to 86 percent of its normal downforce, a substantial improvement over the old 55 percent figure and the direct mechanical reason the rules were expected to produce closer racing, a change detailed in The Race's breakdown of the 2022 aerodynamic rules.
The Side Effect Nobody Fully Modeled: Porpoising
The floor-based downforce came with an unplanned consequence. At speeds above roughly 160 to 180 kilometers per hour, several 2022-spec cars began a violent, high-frequency bouncing motion that came to be called porpoising. The mechanism is a feedback loop: as the car's floor gets pulled toward the ground, the venturi tunnels can compress enough to stall the airflow entirely, causing an instant loss of downforce. The car springs back up, the airflow reattaches, downforce returns, and the whole cycle repeats at a frequency of roughly 4 to 6 Hz.
Stiffer suspension setups, adopted to keep the floor at the ideal ride height for maximum ground effect, made the problem worse by removing the mechanical damping that might otherwise have absorbed the oscillation. Several teams spent much of the first half of the 2022 season running cars stiff enough to control porpoising but harsh enough to fatigue drivers over a race distance, before better floor-edge development and suspension tuning brought the bouncing under control.
Mercedes was the highest-profile case. The team's W13 chassis bounced so violently through fast corners and down straights in the early 2022 races that both Lewis Hamilton and George Russell reported back pain after events, and the team spent several race weekends running the car higher off the ground than its aerodynamic design intended simply to keep the bouncing manageable. Raising ride height sacrifices the very ground effect the floor is designed to generate, which is why Mercedes started the 2022 season well off the pace it had shown in prior years despite fielding a car that, on paper, followed the same regulations as every other team on the grid.
Did the Rules Actually Produce Closer Racing?
By the metric the rules were designed to move, the answer is yes, measurably. Across the 2021 season, cars completed 599 genuine on-track overtakes, counting only passes that did not involve pit stops or mechanical retirements. In 2022, over the same 22-race calendar length, that number rose to 785, a 31 percent increase. Pirelli's own internal tracking, using a slightly different counting method, arrived at a similar conclusion, reporting roughly a 30 percent rise in overtakes from 2021 to 2022.
Race broadcasts from that season reflected the shift qualitatively as well as statistically: multiple cars racing wheel to wheel for several laps at a stretch, trading positions more than once in the same corner, became a regular occurrence rather than an occasional highlight. That said, the same season also produced a wider performance gap between the fastest and slowest teams than 2021 had, since ground-effect floors turned out to reward precise aerodynamic development even more than the previous wing-based rules did, meaning closer racing between similarly matched cars did not necessarily translate into a tighter overall field.
What the Data Says About Racing Now
The 2022 rules solved the specific problem they targeted. Moving downforce generation from wings to the floor cut the dirty-air penalty for a following car by roughly 30 percentage points, and that change shows up directly in a 31 percent jump in real overtakes the very first season the rules took effect. Porpoising was a real and initially serious side effect of chasing that downforce through stiffer, lower-riding cars, but it was a solvable engineering problem rather than a flaw in the underlying aerodynamic concept, and teams engineered their way past it within a single season. The clearest lesson from the switch is that in Formula 1, the shape of the wings was never really the obstacle to close racing. Where the downforce came from was.
