Following the extreme bouncing earlier in the season that left drivers complaining about the safety implications, the FIA announced ahead of the Canadian Grand Prix that it was introducing an aerodynamic wobble metric that teams would not be allowed to overtake.
Teams had to make sure their car was below the maximum rebound limit on every lap, otherwise they risked being penalized for safety reasons.
In a document sent to teams ahead of the Montreal race, they were warned that failure to follow the rules would lead to the risk of cars being excluded from events.
F1 single-seater manager Nikolas Tombazis said in the note: “Any car whose AOM exceeds the stipulated AOM [limit] will be reported to the Stewards with the recommendation to exclude them from the sprint or race results.”
After some debate with the teams on the implications of the metric, it finally came into effect at the Belgian Grand Prix.
At this point in the campaign, with teams having a much better understanding of the forces that sparked much of the early-season porpoising, no team has so far missed the metric.
However, there were fears that some of the late-season races on bumpier tracks – including Singapore and Austin – could have triggered particular headaches.
With the metric taken as an average over a distance – initially 10 J/kg per 100 km – racing the cars had shown that if the cars hit bumps in the track, these impact peaks could have a huge impact on the increase in overall average. .
Running cars on particularly bumpy tracks meant that teams could inadvertently exceed the AOM limit due to the surface of the circuit rather than anything to do with too much porpoising.
F1 returns to Singapore for the first time since 2019, with question marks over how the new cars will handle its bumpy street circuit.
Photo by: Lionel Ng / Motorsport footage
Ahead of the Singapore GP, Tombazis wrote to the teams to say the FIA was now tweaking the metrics to help alleviate the bumpy track complication.
The governing body informed the teams that to avoid excessive energy spikes caused by bumps in the track that skew the metric, a new maximum reading limit will be put in place to disregard these extreme impacts.
The FIA has said there will now be an upper limit of 7G assigned to readings – meaning any track strikes above that will not be considered for metric compliance.
This change in approach should help teams avoid the risk of inadvertently exceeding the AOM limit.
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