F1 News: Max Verstappen Stands Against FIA’s New Porpoising Directive

Max Verstappen has made it clear that he is standing against the new FIA’s directive to deal with the porpoising issues many of the teams are struggling with.

2022 brought a change of regulations to F1 with the majority of downforce coming from underneath the car through a phenomenon called ground effect. This was brought in to promote closer racing with less dirty air behind the car, but so far it’s caused a lot of porpoising issues, especially with Mercedes.

Thursday afternoon brought a release from the FIA stating that they’ve decided to step in. Quite how they’re going to do this is vague, but they’ll be measuring the vertical movement of cars and will set a “quantitative limit”.

Lewis Hamilton could be seen holding his back when he exited his car after the Azerbaijan Grand Prix last weekend. Team principal Toto Wolff even admitted that the vertical forces were equal to that of 6Gs, adding that the majority of drivers have agreed that something needs to be done.

Max Verstappen’s reaction to FIA Directives

Max Verstappen doesn’t agree with this, admitting that they shouldn’t be introducing technical directives when some teams have been able to fix the issue.

Red Bull is one of these teams – the magic of Adrian Newey – and Verstappen believes that Mercedes is influencing the FIA.

“I think it’s a bit disappointing that again there is a rule change mid-season, I would say,” Verstappen told RACER.

“It’s not even about affecting us more or less than other teams, but it shouldn’t be that one team is complaining a lot and suddenly then they change the regs around it.

“I think there are a lot of teams that actually did an amazing job to not have these kind of issues, so it is possible to drive around it.

“If you raise your car then you won’t have these issues, but you lose performance.

“But if you can’t design the car properly for that then that’s your fault, it’s not the regs’ fault. For me that is a bit of a shame.”