Ferrari confident it has got on top of F1 porpoising problems
Ferrari believes it has got on top of the porpoising headache that many Formula 1 teams suffered in the first pre-season test in Spain last week.
The Italian outfit was struggling at times with excessive car bouncing down the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya straights, and a video released by F1 showed the phenomenon as Charles Leclerc was experiencing it.
But as the first test came to a close on Friday, Ferrari believes that it made some good progress on the issue and was in a much happier place with its F1-75.
Team principal Mattia Binotto said: “On the bouncing, I think it was an issue but it's not any more.
“If we're looking at this on Thursday afternoon and earlier on Friday, I think we are bouncing a lot less. And somehow we are managing the situation.”
Despite having to spend some time getting on top of the porpoising, Ferrari looked competitive throughout the Barcelona week and was singled out by many as the most promising of the teams.
Binotto has played his team’s form down though, and reckons that the performance of everyone will close up once teams are running in more representative conditions.
Mattia Binotto, Team Principal, Ferrari, in the Press Conference
Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images
“We are happy, first because I think we have done a lot of laps,” he said about the test.
“We have learned from the car, collecting data, but I think if you look at the performance of the lap time, it is too early days.
“We are not running all in the same conditions and I am expecting other cars to be very fast.
“More [important] for us was to be consistent running, and really try to collect as much data as we could, because there are still a lot of issues to address or potential to extract.
“I think that now we will be back in Maranello before to go to Bahrain and we have a few days really to look at all the data and try somehow to optimise the current car.”
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