Mercedes' porpoising problem explained by Peter Wright

Can Mercedes solve their chronic problems with porpoising (or bouncing) without dialling-back their current, prodigious downforce levels? That is the big question the F1 world is asking as the teams line up for the third round of the FIA World Championship in Melbourne in a week's time. In this video we talk to Peter Wright, the man who invented ground effect in F1 under the auspices of Tony Rudd and Colin Chapman.

A brilliant engineer who worked initially for BRM, Peter designed a wind tunnel for Specialised Mouldings before joining Lotus in the mid-1970s, when his work in the Imperial College tunnel resulted in the revolutionary ground effect Lotus 78s and 79s. Both cars featured full ground effect side pods - and the science behind them is therefore directly relative to today's new-gen F1 cars. All too familiar with the characteristic of porpoising, Peter in this video explains the phenomenon and reveals the light-hearted advice he recently passed on to Mercedes' Director of Engineering, James Allison.

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Leopold

Leopold Pleijsier founded F1-Fansite.com in 2001 and has followed Formula 1 since the early 1980s. He writes about daily F1 news, race weekends, drivers and the sport’s history.

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