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.
