"It makes you a little bit ill" - Ferrari driver describes experience with porpoising

Ferrari's Charles Leclerc claims porpoising can make drivers nauseous in the car and likened it to turbulence felt during airplane flights.

The two-time Grand Prix winner discussed it, saying:

“It feels like turbulence on an aeroplane, going up and down the whole straight. I think one of the videos that F1 posted shows this phenomenon quite well, and I can’t say it feels nice. It makes you a little bit ill, but it’s okay. It’s still very early days for this project. So it feels like it’s an issue that everyone has in the paddock more or less but yeah, in this paddock all the best engineers of the world are here so I’m pretty sure that we’ll find a solution.”

The Monegasque has been a keen observer of the porpoising phenomenon that seems to have caught all F1 teams by surprise during pre-season testing in Barcelona.

For the uninitiated, porpoising is a phenomenon that causes F1 cars to violently bounce up and down on their rear suspensions at near top speeds. The movement imitates the motion that porpoises make when moving through the ocean, hence the name.

A video of Charles Leclerc driving the Ferrari F1-75 while it bounced relentlessly first showed the porpoising problem to the world.

Watch the video here:

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Ferrari's Charles Leclerc feels F1 teams are still hiding their true form

Ferrari driver Charles Leclerc believes most teams were hiding their true form in the first round of pre-season testing in Barcelona.

Speaking to the media at the Circuit de Catalunya after the first day of testing, the 24-year-old said:

“It was the first time that we could really push in our new car and it felt really good to be back behind the wheel. We completed all the tests we wanted to and ran through our full program smoothly, which is good for a new car. I’m looking forward to being back on track again tomorrow. The initial feeling is not bad, but we shouldn’t get carried away by the timesheets today, as these are early days and everyone is still hiding their true form. It’s impossible to have a clear picture just yet, so we have to stay focused and keep working hard. We put in a lot of laps, more than any other team today, and that’s a positive we will build on.”

Ferrari has confirmed their F1-75 will not change a great deal going into the second round of testing in Bahrain. Team principal Mattia Binotto said the spec from Barcelona will be brought to Sakhir ahead of the season opener.