FIA Single Seater Director Nikolas Tombazis has said that easing out bump-induced crashes in Formula 1 is balancing “a thin line” between track features and ride height of the cars.
In the latter half of the 2023 season, both Lando Norris and Carlos Sainz fell victim to incidents on bumps out on track at the Las Vegas and Abu Dhabi weekends respectively.
Norris’ McLaren was impacted by a bump in the early moments of the race in Vegas, while Sainz’s Ferrari hit a bump in a Friday practice session at the Yas Marina Circuit.
With the current ground effect ruleset in F1, engineers run cars as low as possible to chase aerodynamic performance, making them susceptible to bumps in the surface.
Tombazis has said that the FIA would prefer if teams ran cars higher to avoid repeat incidents like the ones suffered by Norris and Sainz but admits that is easier said than done and will regardless look at how a balance of circuit tweaks and car ride heights can be made in the aim of safety.
“Well, we do need to make sure circuits, generally speaking, avoid features which may cause that,” Tombazis said via Motorsport.com.
“It’s a thin line between if maybe there is the possibility for the circuit to sort out some features in detail, and where the teams may just need to raise the car a bit more.
“We obviously will try to fix these areas of the circuits.
“Are the cars too low?
“Yes, we would rather they were running a bit higher.
“But the inherent characteristic of a ground effect car is that it tends to have more performance running low. So that’s something that I don’t think we can easily avoid.”
This isn’t the first time that cars running a low ride height have caused a potential safety concern.
When the ground effect rules were introduced in 2022, many teams suffered from an oscillating motion commonly known as porpoising which in turn caused a physical health risk to the drivers in the cockpit.
The FIA eventually stepped in and issued a technical directive to limit the porpoising phenomenon at the 2022 Belgian Grand Prix, before the teams themselves got on top of the issue ahead of the 2023 season.
However, in this past season, low ride heights cled to a technical issue in Austin, Texas with Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton excluded from the US GP for excessive skid plank wear.
Hamilton and Leclerc fell foul of the ruling for being one of the few cars checked in post-race scrutineering, with the FIA unable to enter all vehicles into the scrutineering process on the grounds of how time-consuming the task would be.
A potential solution to this issue would be to mandate a standard skid plank and block on all cars, but such an idea has been met with resistance amongst the paddock.
Instead, any such solution will be pushed back into the melting pot of regulatory discussion for the next major rule change coming to F1 in 2026.
“Sometimes we want to do things but we still need to go through governance and the teams need to vote for it – and we don’t have enough support,” Tombazis added.
“So, for 2026, we believe we need to simplify very much that area.”
