Fresh Lewis Hamilton evidence emerges after Ferrari damaged by groundhog hit
Lewis Hamilton’s race in Canada was scuppered by the damage sustained when he hit a groundhog on track, destroying the right-hand side of the Ferrari SF-25’s floor.
Reportedly worth around 20 points of downforce, Hamilton’s race was a lonely one; more about bringing the car home than racing as that damage wasn’t the only issue he was managing.
Lewis Hamilton’s Groundhog Day
The floor is of critical importance with this generation of car, owing to the amount of performance derived from it.
Teams have, over the course of the last four seasons, found ways to mitigate many of the issues seen when the sport reintroduced ‘ground effect’ underfloor tunnels and larger diffusers, with porpoising and bouncing now largely eradicated.
However, it’s not entirely gone with teams having to be especially mindful of the car’s ride height when setting the car up for a race weekend.
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Damage can also be detrimental in this respect, as it can alter the car’s handling characteristics and make it very difficult to drive.
In the case of the damage sustained by Lewis Hamilton it was to one side of the car, with his race engineer Riccardo Adami confirming during the race that it was enough to affect performance.
“Confirming we do see a loss of downforce in the car, or damage perhaps. Twenty points missing,” Adami said.
Hamilton would go on to inspect the area after the race and note how much damage there was: “The floor basically, the right side, there’s a hole in it and the vanes are all gone.”
And whilst that initial analysis suggests a 20 point loss in downforce, with many attributing that to around half a second per lap, that’s a moving target.
It’s also the reason why the team gave it as a points loss; a laptime figure will fluctuate for other reasons aside from the damage, whilst it’s also likely that there’d be more degradation to the floor and the associated fences as the race unfolded.
As we can see in the image above, the most inboard fence, which usually sits above the floor’s leading edge (see inset), providing assistance to the flow over that surface and runs under the floor was obliterated, whilst we can still see the remnants of the central fence, albeit a large chunk of it was destroyed.
Furthermore, whilst we can see the external damage, those floor fences (the vanes that Hamilton mentions) stretch back under the car, arch around and then terminate on the side of the floor, which means there’s likely even more damage that we can’t see.
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Hamilton did seem buoyed by his performance afterwards, though, as the damage wasn’t the only issue he was managing during the race.
“It was feeling pretty decent up until then [when the damage occurred], I got a good start, held position, I was holding onto the group, I was managing the tyres well, so I was feeling optimistic.
“So, given that, we had a brake issue halfway through as well, and then we stayed out probably too long in the first stop and came out behind traffic, and just went from one thing to another.”
In some respects damage on this level could have been much more detrimental to the performance of the car, given it seemingly didn’t have a dramatic effect on the car’s balance or any unwanted aerodynamic phenomenon that would make driving the car for that distance uncomfortable.
All in all it was a solid result for both Ferrari and Hamilton, who had to use his wealth of experience to drive around the issues he was encountering.
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