Every team faced porpoising to some degree during pre-season testing, with Charles Leclerc admitting it made him feel slightly ill.
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Ferrari driver Charles Leclerc says that being in a Formula 1 car that is porpoising is akin to experiencing turbulence on a flight.
Porpoising is the phenomenon of the cars bouncing up and down at the high speed parts of the circuit. Given the current F1 cars use ground effect to generate downforce, there were fears porpoising might be an issue.
Indeed, every team faced it to some degree during pre-season testing at Barcelona. And Leclerc admitted that experiencing it made him feel slightly ill.
“It feels like turbulence on an aeroplane, going up and down the whole straight,” Leclerc told Motorsport.
“I think one of the videos that F1 posted shows this phenomenon quite well, and I can’t say it feels nice. It makes you a little bit ill, but it’s okay.
“It’s still very early days for this project. So it feels like it’s an issue that everyone has in the paddock more or less but yeah, in this paddock all the best engineers of the world are here so I’m pretty sure that we’ll find a solution.”
Leclerc was also pleased with how Ferrari fared during pre-season testing. The F1-75 looked good consistently during the first round of testing.
He said he was happy with how things went but it was too early to judge anyone’s performance as of now.
“We’ve done many laps, no major issues which is always great considering it’s a completely new project,” he said. “So this is good. We’ve tested a lot of new things.
“Then in terms of performance it’s impossible to know where we are compared to the others, it’s still very early days, everyone is hiding a little bit their performance, and we’ll only know I think at the first qualifying of the year where’s the potential of everyone.”
He also said that the team are not focused on anything but their own development as of now.
“We are quite happy that things have gone smoothly. On the other hand, I think we are working harder than ever to just try and keep our heads down.
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“Of course, it’s always nice to see yourself P1. But that doesn’t mean anything, and I think everyone is aware of this in the team.
“So we are not really focusing on the performance at all. We’re just focusing on ourselves, again, try to try as many things as possible to try and understand ways of this car.
“And then onto Bahrain to try to push the car a bit more there.”
