Should DRS be removed from Formula 1?

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Should DRS go_.jpg

What are your thoughts on DRS?

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With two races out of the way, we have experienced the new 2022 regulations and how the cars race. Should the Drag Reduction System (DRS) be removed from Formula 1 or be kept?

The 2022 regulations were a massive overhaul of the car regulations. The 2022 regulations which were originally slated for 2021 but were delayed due to the Covid-19 pandemic and have one major principle to allow cars to race closer.

With previous regulations, a following car would lose 35% of their downforce when racing within 20 metres of the car ahead. That loss of downforce could increase to 47% if the following car got within 10 metres of the car ahead.

The new regulations are meant to reduce the downforce lost and from what we have seen so far, the new regulations appear to work.

So now that we know cars are able to drive closer to each other, should we remove DRS?

Drag Reduction System (DRS) was introduced to F1 in 2011. DRS was implemented as a tool to allow cars to overtake. It is essentially an adjustable rear wing that is operated by the driver. DRS has strict conditions where the racing conditions must be safe and the pursuing car must be within a one second gap of the car in front as it crosses the DRS detection zone.

When it was introduced, it was met with a mixed reaction. Some thought it to be the solution to a lack of overtaking, whilst others thought it made overtaking too easy. Now that we appear to have cars that can drive closer to each other, surely this makes overtaking even easier?

Bahrain 2022​

During the first race of the season, we saw Charles Leclerc and Max Verstappen battling for the lead - before Max had to retire. During this race we appeared to see the immense advantage Max had over Charles along the start/finish straight. At times, Max was just within the one second gap that is required to activate DRS, yet was able to get to T1 first. However, DRS wasn’t quite as powerful as it first appeared here. After the race Charles Leclerc stated that he allowed Max to close the gap along the start/finish straight, so that he had DRS immediately after - which allowed him to hold onto the lead.

Bahrain DRS.jpg


Saudi Arabia 2022​

The second race of the season was at Jeddah and this is where we say a very peculiar thing indeed. Whilst battling for the lead, we saw Charles and Max both hit the brakes hard before entering the DRS detection zone for the start/finish straight. It would appear that whoever entered the final corner first would be at a massive disadvantage and could be easily overtaken. So the result saw both drivers braking heavily, trying to be the second car to enter the final corner. But, this race was more than just the DRS zones, it showed how well these cars can follow each other. Both the Ferrari and Red Bull were able to follow each other closely through most of the lap, which was not so easy in 2021 with the previous F1 regulations.

Jeddah DRS.jpg


Calls for a change to DRS​

Many fans have started to call for a change to the DRS rules and those calls for a change could be amplified further with this week’s race at Albert Park. The Australian GP has an unprecedented 4 DRS zones, one along the main straight, another between turns 2 and 3, the third between turns 8 and 9, and the fourth between turns 10 and 11.

Australia DRS.jpg


Here are our thoughts on some potential options for 2022.

Remove DRS completely. If DRS were to be removed completely, then there will be one certainty - less overtaking. DRS is there to help overtaking, so completely removing it will have an impact on the amount of overtakes that are seen during a race. Also, removing DRS will expose how well the F1 2022 regulation cars actually follow each other. There is also the cost to take into account as each team has a budget cap.

If DRS were to be removed, the rear wings may have to keep the DRS function for the remainder of the season. It also may not be as simple as removing the adjustable flap, as these wings will most definitely have been designed to optimise DRS in some way and so may need a complete redesign.
  • Pros - Real overtaking
  • Cons - Less overtaking and potential cost implication
Restrict the use of DRS. The main disadvantage of DRS is that it gives the driver behind an advantage over the driver ahead. However, this could be eradicated if the DRS detection zones were removed and drivers were allowed to use DRS whenever they liked - still with designated DRS zones. This would provide the driver ahead to have a way to defend from an overtaking car. It could also be used by drivers who are attempting to complete an over or undercut, by using DRS to put in a fast lap whilst other drivers are pitting.

The caveat to this is that there would be a limited number of times any one driver could activate DRS during a race.
  • Pros - allows driver ahead to defend and tactical use of DRS
  • Cons - still doesn’t address DRS being potentially overpowered
Leave it as it is. Whilst we are only two races into the season, removing DRS or changing the way it is utilised could be potentially unfair. There were 77 overtakes in Bahrain and 33 overtakes in Saudi Arabia - the majority of these overtakes would have been with the aid of DRS. This means that DRS is already a factor to the amount of points certain drivers have been rewarded and this includes Max Verstappen who may not have won the race at Jeddah without DRS.

Love it or hate it, DRS does provide more opportunities to overtake and without DRS there will be less overtaking. Less overtaking could have an impact on the global audience, especially affecting the audience who have only known F1 with DRS. A result of this could mean an impact on F1 financially - with less fans watching F1 and fewer companies willing to invest in the motorsport.

Finally, leaving DRS as it is allows the FIA to evaluate the entire season and to properly formulate a plan for 2023, if they chose to change DRS in some way in the future.

What are your thoughts about DRS? Should we keep it, change it, or leave it?
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Damian Reed
Damian Reed
PC geek, gamer, content creator, and passionate sim racer.
I live life a 1/4 mile at a time, it takes me ages to get anywhere!

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Comments

ChaosZeroJK
Luigi Mazzola, former head engineer of the Ferrari Squadra Prove (the team in charge of private testing back in the Schumacher days when such practices were still allowed) recently said that DRS is a necessary evil. Nobody likes it, but it is there to stay because even these new cars would have troubles overtaking without it as they make it easier to follow each other through the corners, but have less of a "punch" when slipstreaming each other on the straights.

What needs to change are the rules of engagement. It is mind boggling that DRS is disabled just after a safety car period (rightfully so) but that is not the case during a VSC period which is effectively the same thing, a race being temporarily neutralised.

There wouldn't have been a chance in hell for Verstappen to make that overtake on Leclerc 2 weeks ago had that been the case, for example.

Another problem is caused by consecutive DRS zones just corners apart from each other, meaning that the overtaker gets overtaken once again in rapid succession and that can and will lead to potentially dangerous situations like Hamilton rear ending and crashing into Verstappen last year or Verstappen and Leclerc almost wrecking into each other for that same reason and in that exact same place this year.

But in reality, the biggest problem is given by the tracks themselves. Contemporary F1 cars have long since outgrown most of the tracks they race at. So adding more DRS zones is just a stupid attempt at fixing a problem that is caused by the natural evolution of technology.

And F1 being more of a show than an actual competition nowadays mandates for tracks to be made with "overtaking opportunities" in mind, regardless of whether or not the layouts have a good flow or make sense for these cars to race on, and you end up with tracks full of 90° corners that make no sense and still do nothing when it comes to "overtaking opportunities".

Tl;dr
DRS is a symptom, not a cause. F1 is broken at a fundamental level.
 
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Richard Wilks
pai said:
The problem with current cars compared to 90s and 80s, it's not the amount of downforce generated, it's how effective they are in sealing all laminar airflows behind the car. It's probable that a current F1 car (or let's say from last year) generates as much turbulent air as 30 years ago, but the difference is that 30 years ago, the cars punched a bigger hole in the air, creating such a vacuum that would slingshot the car behind easily. Now the car behind gets all the dirty air and not even half the tow.

Remove draft from the racing, and overtaking moves plummet. Simracing has been a great testbed for this: 10 years ago iRacing was using some aero numbers that neutralized the tow effect in a big manner. It was very hard to get a run on other car and overtake it, even with Miatas where the aero wake effects are virtually non existant. The quality of racing went noticeably down, because you had to resort to bullying your way through as the only tactic possible. It improved again as the tow effect was restored.

It's a common theme in saying that underbody downforce is cleaner and produces better racing that bottom one. But then: did racing really get worse in 1983 when F1 banned shaped floors and teams had to resort to oversized wings to claw downforce back? Footage from the era tends to point otherwise.

I think overtake numbers per race in F1 are available since 1985. There is a steady decline on the stat year after year, all the way down to 2010, before the artificial spike of 2011. Downforce went up and down, power went up and down, mechanical grip went up and down, and overtake numbers didn't stop declining. What changed? IMO, it's the efficiency of designs what remained and kept on improving, with a focus on making airflows stay as well attached to the bodywork as possible, and sealing behind the car as close as possible, for both improving the perfomance of the car itself, and also making it harder for the chasing rival to make a move on it.
Click to expand...
Ill tell you what changed, tires changed.

You limited power, you limited total downforce, you limited everything except tires.

Cars these days dont lack mechanical grip. If anything, they have too much of it. There is almost no room for mistakes, the braking zones are incredibly short, and the cars also grew in length and in weight, making them a lot less agile to be able to make a do or die late move to surprise the driver in front.


Racing didnt get worse in 1983 because the downforce basically disappeared, replaced by HUGE amounts of drag, that created a much bigger slipstream effect, compounded by the turbo engines that were finally coming of age, which helped a lot overtakes in the fuel limited era, because nobody was running full boost all the time.

But guess what, there were lots of overtakes before 1983 too. When cars had minimum drag, huge downforce, and "little" power from the DFV engines. Why? Because they could follow each other, brakes were not as good, and braking zones were still long.

Besides, there is the elefant in the room called 90s indycar. Those cars never had any problem following and overtaking. Why? Again, ground effects, very clean shapes for ovals, and huge power to narrower tires than F1s. More mistakes, harder to put the power down, more overtakes.


Like i said before, ditch the DRS, and introduce proper rules that will shape the cars into what worked well in the past. ITs not that hard, but everybody seems against it, for all the wrong reasons.
 
Richard Wilks
ChaosZeroJK said:
Luigi Mazzola, former head engineer of the Ferrari Squadra Prove (the team in charge of private testing back in the Schumacher days when such practices were still allowed) recently said that DRS is a necessary evil. Nobody likes it, but it is there to stay because even these new cars would have troubles overtaking without it as they make it easier to follow each other through the corners, but have less of a "punch" when slipstreaming each other on the straights.

What needs to change are the rules of engagement. It is mind boggling that DRS is disabled just after a safety car period (rightfully so) but that is not the case during a VSC period which is effectively the same thing, a race being temporarily neutralised.

There wouldn't have been a chance in hell for Verstappen to make that overtake on Leclerc 2 weeks ago had that been the case, for example.

Another problem is caused by consecutive DRS zones just corners apart from each other, meaning that the overtaker gets overtaken once again in rapid succession and that can and will lead to potentially dangerous situations like Hamilton rear ending and crashing into Verstappen last year or Verstappen and Leclerc almost wrecking into each other for that same reason and in that exact same place this year.

But in reality, the biggest problem is given by the tracks themselves. Contemporary F1 cars have long since outgrown most of the tracks they race at. So adding more DRS zones is just a stupid attempt at fixing a problem that is caused by the natural evolution of technology.

And F1 being more of a show than an actual competition nowadays mandates for tracks to be made with "overtaking opportunities" in mind, regardless of whether or not the layouts have a good flow or make sense for these cars to race on, and you end up with tracks full of 90° corners that make no sense and still do nothing when it comes to "overtaking opportunities".

Tl;dr
DRS is a symptom, not a cause. F1 is broken at a fundamental level.
Click to expand...
I agree with almost everything you said, except this bit : ". So adding more DRS zones is just a stupid attempt at fixing a problem that is caused by the natural evolution of technology."

Almost nothing in racing is a natural evolution of technology, but rather of regulations.

People dont seem to understand this, which is why whenever i say that the aero parts of the car should almost be spec at this point, is met with so much disaproval and arguments of "what about evolution?" Well almost everything in an F1 car is already regulated to be worse from what we could actually do given more freedom. Everything. So this argument makes no sense.

The only reason why this doesnt happen is because F1 teams are now basically corporations with hundreds of workers, many working on Wind tunnels or CFDs that cost millions, so now F1 is a "too big to fail" economy, and they dont want to let any of that go.
 
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Madhat
Premium
Keep DRS, but add limited push to pass. This would give a more strategic element to the racing.
 
RowanZa
Keep it, but use it like in Indy. Attack and defend anywhere but limit the number of times it can be used.
 
MJQT
I'd say keep it for this season, but behind the scenes look at removing it or limiting its use going forward (including testing with real drivers in real cars). Then possibly change the rules next year or some other year in the future.
 
BillyBobSenna
Premium
I think the amount of DRS usage available should be related to the amount of fanboost you have. Once again, Formula E leading the way!
 
wolftree
My opinion after reading this thread is that sim racers should study some basic physics and race car engineering before strongly opining on what makes for good racing.
 
David Jessat
BillyBobSenna said:
I think the amount of DRS usage available should be related to the amount of fanboost you have. Once again, Formula E leading the way!
Click to expand...
Damn...I hope you're joking...:roflmao:

I think DRS should do nothing more than compensate for what you lose while following through corners and then emulate effektive slipstream - and get disabled once you pull out of that to overtake.
 
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samster_uk_2008
No because the reality of modern F1 with the sheer speed and aerodynamics of the cars, DRS is needed if overtakes are going to happen.
 
D
wolftree said:
My opinion after reading this thread is that sim racers should study some basic physics and race car engineering before strongly opining on what makes for good racing.
Click to expand...
Then enlighten us with your wisdom please. Think we are all happy to learn more.
 
P
Richard Wilks said:
Ill tell you what changed, tires changed.

You limited power, you limited total downforce, you limited everything except tires.

Cars these days dont lack mechanical grip. If anything, they have too much of it. There is almost no room for mistakes, the braking zones are incredibly short, and the cars also grew in length and in weight, making them a lot less agile to be able to make a do or die late move to surprise the driver in front.


Racing didnt get worse in 1983 because the downforce basically disappeared, replaced by HUGE amounts of drag, that created a much bigger slipstream effect, compounded by the turbo engines that were finally coming of age, which helped a lot overtakes in the fuel limited era, because nobody was running full boost all the time.

But guess what, there were lots of overtakes before 1983 too. When cars had minimum drag, huge downforce, and "little" power from the DFV engines. Why? Because they could follow each other, brakes were not as good, and braking zones were still long.

Besides, there is the elefant in the room called 90s indycar. Those cars never had any problem following and overtaking. Why? Again, ground effects, very clean shapes for ovals, and huge power to narrower tires than F1s. More mistakes, harder to put the power down, more overtakes.


Like i said before, ditch the DRS, and introduce proper rules that will shape the cars into what worked well in the past. ITs not that hard, but everybody seems against it, for all the wrong reasons.
Click to expand...
Well, the grooved tyre rules in 1998 did precisely that, limit tyre perfomance, together with downforce, and not limiting engines. At least for a while, before the tyre war heated up and clawed back the perfomance lost. Every aspect of perfomance in an F1 car has been limited at some point from 1985 to 2010, and overtake numbers never stopped dropping. Which I believe enhances my argument of how the diminishing effect of the tow has impacted racing. But I'm not blindingly saying that it's the only thing to ponder, or at least that's why I think, I may have come across the wrong way.

I'm not disagreeing with you. The windows of perfomance of these cars have become very small. Braking distances are tight, mistakes are masked, cars are on rails or spinning with little to nothing in between (it has improved from last year from what I can tell visually, but still not enough).

Back to the ground effect era. Yes there was racing and overtaking before 1983. But if I do a straight comparison between 1982 and 1983, I find the latter with much better racing (which is a very subjective thing anyway). But doing a straight comparison with nowadays is tough, because gearboxes were H Pattern, diffs were purely mechanical, on board adjustments were very limited, tyre peak grip was way lower and perfomance window much wider, and so on. There was room for mistakes, and many overtaking moves were done by pouncing on those mistakes, like a botched gear shift, an oversteer causing momentum loss or braking lock up into corners. There was also the matter that strategy was dictated by how you setup the car, because it dictated how would its handling transition during the race, making it stronger or weaker at different parts of a GP. And sometimes tyre wear would be much higher than expected, causing unexpected changes of the pecking order, unexpected pitstops and so on.

Some genies cannot go back to their bottles. The collective know-how in motorsports is much higher than 30-40 years ago, meaning that the unexpected is much more expected, thanks to the experience, data analysis and number crunching, and the evolution of designs in every aspect of a racecar. Of course, sanctioning bodies can and should do better, like taking away tools from drivers and teams to make things harder and having to work their asses off. I have been saying for years that it would be great if the rulebook mandated a limit of 10-15 maximum inputs that drivers can use inside the cockpit and nothing else. And in that number, throttle, brake, clutch, and shifting up and down are included.

In general, the problem I see with F1, is that the rule changes that happen from time to time introduce problems, but don't take away tools to solve them. An issue arises and teams can throw everything and the kitchen sink to it, it gets solved and the end product is worse than before. An example of this IMO is the banning of Traction Control in 2008, which did more harm than good: it shifted development towards electronic diffs, made it a lot easier for a driver to finetune the handling of the car at each phase of a corner only through settings on the steering wheel, and made the cars more planted than they have ever been. I would like to have them gone as soon as yesterday.

The racing at CART during the 90s is my favorite ever. But F1 was no slouch in those years either. Cars were tough, tools in cockpit (besides top cars in 92-93 that is) were limited, and how they had to tackle races and work their asses off in each part was wonderful to see, in both series. But as years went on, both wore off: one had technological advancements going too far and not being curbed, to the detriment of the racing show; the other became spec racing a couple years into 00s. The racing has been great, but the allure has not come close to the golden years. And you cannot compare the quality of racing and how each series solve their problems when one runs spec bodywork.

What irritates me of this situation, is that it seems like in car racing it's either opening up development and see the costs rise up and the quality of the show go down, or it's spec racing, and there is nothing in between. I know that the garagista days are in the past, but I also believe that racing series can do something better than what we have in offer, but don't seem interested in doing it, for a number of reasons that I suspect are part of the political and economical backstage of racing that a commoner racing fan like myself does not have access to for understanding.
 
NtsParadize
Colt459 said:
Do the anti-DRS folks realize it only exists because the original “unfair” advantage is from the leading car messing up the air flow behind it.

Perhaps you can trim it down, but to eliminate it artificially prohibits passing since the faster can’t can’t actually be faster when it is trailing.
Click to expand...
Dirty air isn't "unfair", it's a natural consequence of fast, high downforce race cars.
 
D
Niels_at_home said:
Overtaking doesn't equal excitement, Crofty tends to forget that. :)
Click to expand...

So true it's kinda more how you overtook not that you overtook. The act of trying/planning an overtake and succeding or failing misserably (<- I mostly do this one LOL) is whats exciting. Setting up a pass by pressuring a mistake or getting a better line/run through a corner after learning where a driver is weak is where it's at IMO, not pressing a button and blowing past on the straight.
 
Antonio Castagna
I have always thought that the DRS is made only for those who do not know how to overtake an opponent with their skills. Using this help just to show off is a lot of bullshit, the most beautiful duels in the history of this sport did not have such things, there was just the talent.
 
Colt459
NtsParadize said:
Dirty air isn't "unfair", it's a natural consequence of fast, high downforce race cars.
Click to expand...
Yes it is naturally unfair that your car slows down your opponents car.

Why should you have to be two seconds faster per lap just to fight off the front cars airflow to execute a pass?
 
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