Kimi Raikkonen, Ferrari, Baku City Circuit, 2018

DRS will be more powerful and available more often in 2019

2019 F1 season

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DRS will be more powerful and available to drivers on more straights at some tracks following the changes to cars from the 2019 F1 season.

Changes to the shape of F1 rear wings next year will enhance the performance of DRS. This will allow more useful DRS zones to be added at some circuits.

“The DRS effect will increase by approximately 25 to 30%,” estimated the FIA’s head of single-seater technical matters Nikolas Tombazis.

“The delta of the drag of the car when it opens the DRS and deploys it to currently will be bigger, so the delta of speed of the following car will be bigger by that amount as a result. Hence the probability that it can approach the front car will increase.”

This will allow the FIA to make greater use of DRS at some tracks, said race director Charlie Whiting.

“The main advantage to us is we’ll be able to make DRS more effective on shorter straights,” he said.

“At the moment we’re trying to lengthen zones where we can in places like Melbourne, for example. Maybe an extra DRS zone in Canada. Those are the sort of places where with the extra power from the DRS we should be able to make them work a bit better.”

Whiting said the FIA will continue to tune DRS zones to circuits in the same way they do now.

“What we attempt to do is look at how effective the DRS is at each circuit and then we try to tune it in order that you have to be within four-tenths [of a second] of the car in front to make it work.

“Four-tenths is quite a difficult gap to get to. If you can get that and you’ve got the length of straight, you should be alongside by the time you get to the braking point. That’s how we do it now. If we can do it with shorter straights it’s going to work on more tracks.”

However Whiting is wary of making it too easy for drivers to pass.

“It won’t be any more effective in that sense, if we tune it in the same way. Even though it does have increased power, we can use it in more places. But we don’t necessarily want to make overtaking on a given circuit easier, we still want drivers to have to work for it.”

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30 comments on “DRS will be more powerful and available more often in 2019”

  1. Oh great! :(

    1. I know. As a fan, it really feels like talking to a wall during these DRS times. I had hoped with Ross Brawn’s comments things would change, but obviously not.

  2. Is this DRS tweak also a part of the technical rule changes for 2019 or something done on top of them? Because I’m really struggling to understand the point of this. Why don’t they let the effect of the technical changes alone kick in next year and see if they are working in the right direction for 2021? Because if it works, then with a stronger DRS we’ll see cars breezing past each other all the time. And that would defeat the purpose of both these changes themselves.

  3. No thanks!

    In all honesty if the changes just result in more DRS-ing next year then i’m done!

    1. The basis for making it more powerful is to allow DRS to be more effective on tracks like Melbourne, Monaco, Hungary where the straights are too short. They obviously have the ability to shorten the DRS zone on the other tracks. Charlie Whiting has already stated the intention is NOT to make it easier to overtake in general.

  4. Unlike the front wing aero change, this is not something that excites me. It is reminiscent of push-to-pass or a KERS car coming up behind a non-KERS car.

    If anything, I’d say that as DRS is made more powerful, the DRS zones have to be made shorter, so that overtaking isn’t an inevitability. Or push part of the DRS activation zone into the braking zone, so drivers can balance the benefit of DRS vs. the risk of late braking. (Granted, seeing some of the recent banzai moves leading to contact, this might not be a smart idea, unless one is a fan of carbon fibre debris and safety car periods!).

  5. Sometimes I think the DRS zones should be completely inverted: allow the trailing driver free use of DRS over the entire circuit except the current DRS zones.

    Help the cars follow closely through the parts of the circuit where overtaking isn’t possible, but make the drivers work for the pass once they get to the long straights—isn’t that what DRS was supposed to accomplish?

    Really, it doesn’t make any sense to not let drivers use DRS on all the short straights where they’re currently prevented from doing so.

    1. largely agree (with a tweak), @markzastrow.
      see my comment below.

    2. Maybe that’s why DRS is hated so much– people don’t understand how it works, or why it exists.

      Following a car closely in tight, winding corners is very difficult right now. If you’re within 2 seconds, you’re scrubbing off your front tires, because your front wing isn’t working. You can’t go through the corner at the same speed as the guy in front of you.

      This leads to an inverse concertina effect– a sharp corner before a straight actually separates the cars out by multiple seconds, making it impossible to catch anyone on the straights and overtake, let alone pass going into the next corner.

      By reducing the drag (and therefore the downforce) on the rear wing on the straights, the chasing car is able to regain some of that time lost trying to follow closely before the straight– and note that DRS is automatically deactivated when the brakes are used.

      Your proposal would remove rear downforce from the car at the same time it’s missing front downforce from following the car ahead– You would make the cars completely incapable of navigating corners, causing the following car to lose massive amounts of time going through the corners, and there would be no way on earth (save maybe a nitrous bottle) that the following car would ever be able to get close enough to pass on the corner, the straight, or anywhere in between.

      1. @grat: Under this proposal of free use, obviously, the drivers would elect to close the flap in corners.

    3. Good idea!

  6. I don’t understand how on the one hand fans can applaud circuits like Baku and the “racing” it provides, which came predominantly from one DRS assisted corner. But then criticise DRS itself and the idea of it being able to be stronger at more circuits.

    As always the case has been that as long as DRS provides a speed boost enough to get a car along side another, and not allow for the overtake on the straight before defending, it will be good and provide fans with the “action” they crave, which is that all important jostle for position at a corner.

    1. The slipstream was enough at Baku, it wasn’t good racing because of DRS at all. Indeed you could argue there would have been much better racing without the many many DRS weak passes during the race.

    2. I firmly believe that most fans just don’t know what they want. Take the recent knockout qualifying for instance. Fans complain that they want something to spice up the show, KO Qualifying is implemented, it’s barely given a chance, fans moan that it’s horrible and to bring back the old qualifying. All that’s going on while the fans complain that F1 doesn’t respond to the fans while simultaneously bemoaning supposed knee-jerk reactions by the FIA. There’s just no winning.

  7. What do you think about this:
    – Make DRS available for all cars within 2 sec of the car ahead (extra tow);
    – and close the DRS automatically when they are side-by-side.
    This way the DRS does what it’s supposed to do: give the trailing car a bit of a push to overcome the dirty air (which caused it to fall back during the curvy sections). As soon as the cars are side-by-side it should be car and driver only without the artificial help.

    1. Racecar is racecar backwards
      10th May 2018, 18:17

      This is a great idea. How quickly do positions update on the race control system? because if it’s pretty much instantaneous then the DRS could be shut the moment the trailing car moves up a position on the race control system. Ideally you would want it to close slightly earlier than that but I would have thought they could figure out a way with GPS positioning.

      1. Michael Brown (@)
        10th May 2018, 18:48

        @coldfly & racecar
        I propose that DRS can be activated, but only for a few seconds per zone. How much I don’t know, but enough time to give the trailing car a speed boost before it closes.

    2. @coldfly I’ve often thought the DRS zone should end half-way or two thirds down a straight. Allow the driver to activate immediately after exiting a corner (regaining the ground lost in the corner) and then have a deactivation point. This means DRS is mainly used to get in the slipstream, hopefully deactivating as the cars are side by side or close to it. Would make for better racing imo. Question is can they have a sensor on-track that can automatically disables any active DRS.

  8. more good news, it will reach a point it will be always available, so DRS becemos no-DRS

  9. „…you should be alongside by the time you get to the braking point. That’s how we do it now.“

    Yeah sure, that‘s exactly how it works – keep telling that to yourself.

    I‘m afraid more effective DRS is just another thing that leads to converging setups.
    No need for let‘s Say a low-downforce setup If you Start out of position and want to be able to overtake.

  10. Neil (@neilosjames)
    10th May 2018, 17:02

    “What we attempt to do is look at how effective the DRS is at each circuit and then we try to tune it in order that you have to be within four-tenths [of a second] of the car in front to make it work.

    “Four-tenths is quite a difficult gap to get to. If you can get that and you’ve got the length of straight, you should be alongside by the time you get to the braking point. That’s how we do it now. If we can do it with shorter straights it’s going to work on more tracks.”

    I often watch the live gaps as cars enter straights, to see what sort of chance they have of attempting a pass… and I have no idea where Charlie is getting this 0.4 seconds from. It’s never 0.4 seconds – they haven’t been able to follow that closely for years. 0.6 seconds is pretty much the low-end figure if both cars have decent tyres, and generally it seems that a Mercedes can do a near drive-by pass on the calendar’s longer straights if it’s about 0.8 seconds back.

    On most tracks, 0.4 seconds would probably be enough for a ‘natural’ slipstream to do the job of putting the cars close into the braking zone. If they’re genuinely using that difference to set DRS lengths, they’re doing something badly wrong.

    1. On some tracks they start to struggle getting within 2s – the gap varies from circuit to circuit.

  11. Roth Man (@rdotquestionmark)
    10th May 2018, 17:33

    I wish this site would let me swear!!!!!!!

  12. In the end, I doubt it’s really going to be that much different after all. We shall wait and see.

  13. Michael Brown (@)
    10th May 2018, 18:49

    I really, really hope they get rid of DRS by 2021.

  14. Robert McKay
    10th May 2018, 19:21

    Yes, what Canada needs is more DRS. The sport is borked beyond belief.

  15. However Whiting is wary of making it too easy for drivers to pass.

    Why??? Isn’t that the idea???

  16. “Four-tenths is quite a difficult gap to get to. If you can get that and you’ve got the length of straight, you should be alongside by the time you get to the braking point. That’s how we do it now. If we can do it with shorter straights it’s going to work on more tracks.”

    That’s not how they do it though. The drs car will arrive to the next braking point before the car that was being passed. Often times the speed difference is so massive that it is better to not even try to defend. It is like two lanes on a motorway. One goes faster and it takes 0 skill to press that button.

  17. If the bew wings are to help overtaking by allowing cars to fillow more closely why would you need more drs. Thought drs was a sticky plaster but if they spend millions on new wing designs just to add more drs why not just keep the wings the same and add drs?

  18. Yet another example of F1 rule-makers living in their own little world.

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