Ferrari: FIA's porpoising technical directive not the right decision
Ferrari have expressed their opposition to FIA's decision to release a technical directive in order to help comabt the effects caused by porpoising.
The FIA has released a new technical directive, ahead of the Canadian Grand Prix, to tackle the problems caused by porpoising. The TD mostly consists of some guidelines for teams to follow, in order to ensure the drivers' well being. The FIA will monitor the bouncing more closely, and may require from the teams to raise the car by 10mm if not satisfied.
Both Mattia Binotto and Charles Leclerc have spoken negatively about FIA's decision to intervene on the way the teams deal with porpoising.
The Ferrari team principal said: "For us it's that technical directives are not applicable. It's something we mentioned to the FIA, the reasons they are not applicable is that a TD is there to clarify regulations or to somehow to address policing, but a TD is not there to change the regulations. You cannot change the regulation through a TD. And that's governance."
Charles Leclerc believes that all of Ferrari's work, regarding porpoising, has been "put in the bin", as the Monegasque said. It is true, that Ferrari was one of the teams that didn't really struggle with bouncing that much, so it makes sense that the Italian team isn't satisfied with FIA's decision to make it "easier" for other teams.
Talking to Autosport, Leclerc said: "On the one hand, I obviously understand George’s point because when you see him and Lewis get out of their car after Baku, it’s very bad. You can feel probably the pain Lewis is going through at the moment and this is not acceptable.
"But on the other hand also, you cannot underestimate the amount of work that’s been done in the last few months by teams to actually get on top of those issues. This has been our main priority since the first time we tried these cars."
He continued: "We’ve been working to get on top of those issues. I think the improvement has been massive and now all of the work we’ve done, [do we] just put it in the bin because obviously there’s maybe one team that is struggling more than others?
This is my point of view. I obviously understand that on Mercedes it’s very bad, but I also think there are maybe fixes for this"