Is it farewell or good riddance to F1's second ground-effect era?

It’s almost time. Formula 1 awaits the auspicious knock at the door from the Grim Reaper, before the hooded harbinger’s collection of its current technical rules. At the end of 2025, it will lead their passing to the great regulatory filing cabinet in the sky, leaving the door open for its all-new 2026 formula.

How will the 2022-25 era be remembered? The dust will have to settle first before objectivity enters the debate, and the two opposing strands of opinion largely become entwined. For some, the rules brought back a handful of styling cues that were missed from F1 in more recent times: low noses, ground-effect floors, and simplified wings presented a clear shift in the championship’s aesthetic quality.

Despite the strictness of the rules, as F1’s in-house technical group developed a basis to improve the quality of on-track spectacle, the cars looked very different in 2022 – but as is always the case in any technical battleground, convergence was sure to follow.

Plus, the return of underbody venturi tunnels after a 40-year exile turned the current cars into absolute monsters through high-speed corners, at the expense of lower speeds in slower corner conditions. The positive attributes are caveated, however, since the improved effect of following other cars began to dwindle as teams developed new ways of extracting performance from the floors and rear wings. 

The 2022 generation was also an incredibly finicky breed; often, tiny adjustments to ride heights would create vast swings in performance, and recent seasons have exposed their weakness to variations in track conditions. Wind has always been a factor to consider with any aerodynamics-governed pursuit, but changes in direction have often been responsible for more expansive shifts in balance.

Amid the effect of cost caps and restrictions on aerodynamic testing, the field has closed up significantly. At this point in the year, teams are separated by hundredths of a second, not tenths, even with development reducing as resources are placed on the 2026 ruleset. Although four years appears to be only a short cycle, it seems to have been a well-judged duration.

First race of the era in Bahrain was won from pole by Charles Leclercʼs Ferrari

Photo by: Erik Junius

The sense of porpoise of 2022

It’s easy to forget that this rules cycle was supposed to have been in force for five years, not four; the effect of the COVID pandemic in 2020 prompted F1 to delay the introduction by one season to mitigate costs.

The lack of racing in the first half of 2020 and the associated loss of income hit the teams hard, and F1 maintained a duty of care to ensure all 10 teams remained in business and could race in 2021 with largely current machinery. As such, an upgrade token system was implemented to limit the large-scale evolution from 2020 to 2021 – and work on the 2022 cars was not permitted until calendars had been leafed over into 2021.

Thus began the exploration of the new aerodynamics packages. In addition to the low noses and venturi tunnels, there was more uncharted territory for the teams to navigate: wings without ‘conventional’ endplates, the loss of elaborate bargeboard furniture, and the sensitivity associated with the new floors all presented challenges.

The cars began to heave at higher speeds, bouncing on their rigid suspension as the floor took pecks at the track surface

Teams that had long-serving engineers who had been around during F1’s original ground-effect era, or engineers who had worked in other disciplines, could glean some knowledge of how the venturi tunnels would work, but restrictions meant that wind tunnel simulations (ie scale and air speed) did not necessarily present a full picture of the issues that would become apparent in testing.

Those issues emerged in the first Barcelona test when the cars first hit the track in anger. This was especially apparent down the back straight, where the cars began to heave at higher speeds, bouncing on their rigid suspension as the floor took pecks at the track surface. Porpoising was not a new phenomenon, but it came as an unwelcome surprise.

Many theories emerged as the root cause; some suggested that it was a cyclical application of underbody suction bringing the chassis downwards, before stalling as the floor hit the track to lose that suction. Others felt it was a harmonic response to the higher airspeeds, and the outlawing of the ‘third damper’ at the front was unable to keep it in check. 

Key, at McLaren in 2022, admits that teams were initially caught out

Photo by: FIA Pool

Sauber technical director James Key – then of McLaren during 2022 – takes up the story: “It’s definitely an aerodynamic phenomenon. It’s some of the key vortex structures bursting and then coming back to life when you get a bit more height on the floor. 

“We definitely got caught out; my theory on that is because none of the tools we’ve got actually do what a car does. The closest thing we’ve got is a wind tunnel because it’s a real situation, but it hasn’t got suspension, it doesn’t sit on its tyres, it’s got totally different sort of inertias and weights and all that sort of thing and it’s got different aero-elasticity.

“You weren’t going to get that from a wind tunnel. Some did detect certain things in the wind tunnel but it wasn’t like what we saw on track. You don’t see it in a simulator because your wind tunnel data doesn’t contain it. I’ve asked all sorts of questions, like, ‘Why didn’t you simulate this?’ but there was no data to tell us it was going to happen. None of the tools could tell us what was going on.”

Reflecting on the driving experience of the early 2022 cars, Esteban Ocon says that it was “horrible” to manage the porpoising effect. The drivers were concerned by potential trauma, particularly to their backs, and the continual motion affecting the brain. Ocon adds that the overall mass of the car itself, particularly in the low speed, led to a low initial opinion of the formula.

“Nobody saw it coming,” remembers Ocon. “And then we arrived into the first test, and we were like, ‘What is that? That’s horrible!’ It was really not nice, super-stiff, hurting in a bad way, heavy cars at low speeds. It was pretty terrifying in the beginning. But now, it’s looking like much more of this 2020 era, where we are doing very quick lap times.

“The cars are extremely quick. The balance is becoming to be almost perfect, and you need little details to make it good. And it’s a bit more compliant than it was.”

Red Bull stole a march with its sidepod solution, setting a template for others to mimic

Photo by: Getty Images

Much of the porpoising was mitigated by the introduction of an ‘aerodynamic oscillation metric’, implemented by the FIA to force teams to stiffen their floors and stop them flexing the floor edges.

The flex was to create a skirt-like effect to evoke the early ground-effect designs from the 1980s and minimise the coalescence of managed airflow underneath and tyre wake – but it came at the cost of worsening the porpoising effect. The FIA permitted floor ‘stays’ attached to the chassis: small metal rods attached to a bracket to maintain the floor position.

The FIA also mandated a change in floor fence height for 2023, effectively raising the minimum ride heights universally. Ride height was the absolute governing factor in the performance of the floor; getting the car to work consistently at the lowest possible ride height delivers downforce peaks – but the demands of a circuit and the level of bumpiness forces teams to raise them again. So the floor should be able to work in all conditions.

"Very early on you had to make a decision whether you went for the easy-to-find downforce with the car running very low, and then deal with all the consequences, or whether you decided that you couldn’t deal with the consequences" Dave Robson

“Thinking back, the challenge definitely was to understand how you could run the car as low as it wanted to be run, and then how you can rebalance it,” says Williams chief engineer Dave Robson. “That’s what has ultimately led to where we are now – where front wings are a very powerful way of rebalancing the kind of low car.

“Very early on you had to make a decision whether you went for the easy-to-find downforce with the car running very low, and then deal with all the consequences, or whether you decided that you couldn’t deal with the consequences within the regulations.

“Then you had to make the difficult decision to try and find downforce elsewhere, which naturally on a ground effect car is much more difficult. But the less you need to rely on the car running low, the better it is to set the car up to ride well, and the easier it is to get the balance.”

Robson says that at the start it was difficult to get your head around just how complicated aerodynamically the floors are

Photo by: Peter Fox / Getty Images

Through 2022, porpoising was not entirely eradicated, but it became significantly less of a factor as development and the FIA’s intervention was able to redefine the underbody formula.

Through the following seasons, bouncing did occasionally rear its head; Ferrari, for example, had unwittingly reintroduced that vertical instability with its floor upgrade for the 2024 Spanish Grand Prix, something that afflicted it in high-speed corners when in yaw and when aero load was high. This prompted the team to roll back on that floor for the British GP at Silverstone, before a revised floor option at the Hungaroring set the record straight. 

How Perez’s 2023 crashes led to field convergence

It’s not unusual for anyone to suffer a shunt at Monaco; it only takes one snatch of the brakes to book a one-way trip into the wall. Red Bull driver Sergio Perez had his own moment at Sainte Devote during FP1 in 2023. Monaco being Monaco, the only way to remove the all-conquering RB19 was to hoist it onto a crane and lift it into the sky to be deposited off-track. 

Naturally, the fraternity of paddock snappers were in full force to capture the dangling Red Bull, with a series of images disseminating online – and into the laps of the other teams. Red Bull, which was part-way through its eventual run of 14 straight victories, had one of its biggest secrets exposed on a public stage.

Cue engineers becoming increasingly curious about the complexity of the curvature underneath the RB19; presumably, a flurry of virtual facsimiles were circulated through the aero departments at the nine other teams on the grid.

“What was difficult to get your head around to begin with was just how complicated aerodynamically the floors are,” says Robson, “and when you started to get a glimpse of those early Red Bull floors when they would occasionally get lifted up on cranes, and you realise these things can and need to be unbelievably complicated geometrically, that then sets a whole new requirement of what your CFD and approach needed to be.

The hoisting of Perez’s shunted Red Bull at Monaco in 2023 showed secrets of all-conquering RB19ʼs trick floor arrangement

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

“There was a period where we would look at those Red Bull floors and think, ‘Well, what’s the process at which they even decided that was the right thing to do aerodynamically?’, and I think that then highlighted some areas where we were maybe a little bit lacking in the process of how you develop the geometry. That was quite a big change, and quite a big challenge.”

Although a two-dimensional representation of Red Bull’s three-dimensional complexities, the view of the RB19’s secrets ultimately gave the other teams a bit of a lead on where to look for development. Perez’s subsequent crash in Hungary that year only increased the attention on the geometry of the floor – and the resurgence of McLaren through the year and into 2024 provided Red Bull with an increasingly sterner challenge as the formula continued to remain in place. 

Red Bull also informed the direction of other aspects of the car, such as its ramped sidepod solution. Ferrari and Mercedes had taken very different approaches – Ferrari with its square-sided flanks, Mercedes with its ‘zeropod’ solution – as they hoped to generate rear-end downforce through an in-washing approach to the flow around the rear of the car.

While the current rules were initially developed with the plan to remove DRS, the overtaking aid was still required

But Red Bull’s solution delivered that cleaner flow and produced the top-surface pressure mapping necessary to extract more downforce from the rear, and more teams began to fall in line with that particular concept.

Were the rules a success? 

Although the F1 cars lived up to some of the stakeholders’ hopes that they would help to improve the on-track spectacle, at least early on, much of the effect has been diluted. It’s not up to the teams to maintain a specific wake pattern to reduce the effect on the car behind, and the added complexity of front wings and circumvention of the rear wing-to-endplate interface has increased the capacity of the overall wake shed.

It’s also true that, while the current rules were initially developed with the plan to remove DRS, the overtaking aid was still required – the reduction in slipstream effect produced by the 2022 generation gave the device a stay of execution. 

The current rules’ positive impact on overtaking has been welcomed by Haas man Ocon

Photo by: Simon Galloway / LAT Images via Getty Images

The DRS effect has been reduced by continued developments, specifically at low-downforce circuits because the teams have been able to run with much less rear wing thanks to the floor’s downforce output and, as the cars have got better, the ‘racing product’ has been a bit more of a tough sell. Yet, that’s natural for a pretty static ruleset, and the addition of cost cap and aero testing regulations have ultimately brought the field closer together.

From a driver’s perspective, they’ve not necessarily been the most satisfying cars to pedal around a circuit. The size and weight have tended to make them feel like turning an oil tanker around in low-speed conditions, but they’ve generally liked the adhesion and the speed in longer-radius corners. 

“The overtaking has definitely improved,” Ocon reckons. “That’s been one of the positives of this ruleset. Especially when it was first introduced in 2022, we really saw a big difference. If you look at Zandvoort, how close we were following each other, even through that last corner. When you have DRS, you stay within seven, eight tenths of the whole lap, which is quite impressive.”

“They were obviously designed around the ability to overtake,” Key explains. “I guess that got a bit diluted, I don’t think anyone could have said that we’d have the downforce numbers we have now, which are absolutely huge and obviously everything after the car gets affected by that, so I’m not sure if we 100% achieved the ability to overtake easier.

“But it certainly didn’t degrade it, and it probably is a little easier to follow than it was in 2020 and 2021, so I think it kind of semi-achieved that goal.”

That dilution has been apparent in 2025, with races often being defined by the order emerging out of the first corner. As with all things, the 2022-25 regulations have had a balance of good and bad attributes. While most in F1 are resistant to change, they ultimately adapt to their new surroundings and revised metrics – and, more often than not, excel. 

When 2026 comes around, that will be important to remember. Change is good; the new regulations will test drivers and engineers, and reward those most welcoming to them. We can remember the old fondly, but must be open to the new.

This article is one of many in the monthly Autosport magazine. For more premium content, take a look at the December 2025 issue and subscribe today. 

Convergence was inevitable as the cost cap and testing rules have closed up the field

Photo by: Jakub Porzycki / NurPhoto / Getty Images