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.
