I was in favour when it came in, and even when we had embarassing motorway-style overtakes in the past couple of years, I was prepared to defend DRS by pointing out that the very high-deg tyres were a major factor in some of those passes. But we were promised, when it came in, that it was designed to avoid races where on-track overtaking of slower cars even by significantly faster cars was well nigh impossible, but not to make overtaking of slightly slower cars by marginally faster ones trivial. And we were told that the FIA would be prepared to tweak the positioning of the detection zones, the maximum gap required at the detection zone to get the DRS and, crucially, the length and number of activation zones, to ensure those objectves were met. And Whiting specifically said they'd prefer to err on the side of DRS not making mech of a difference, rather than risk overdoing it and making overtaking too easy.
What happened? Virtually none of the things we were promised were done, the activation zones aren't placed in difficult enough areas from the point of view of the attacking car and you don't have to get especially close, so there's no way the defending car can prevent the attacker from getting DRS unless he is actually fast enough to pull away, the activation zones are far too many and far too long, and too often it robs us of exciting racing of the kind we saw at Silverstone between Alonso and Vettel (until Vettel cheated his way past because they don't enforce the track limits, which once again cut that battle short). Why would you dice with your competitor and work out, over the course of a number of laps, and line up a pass that will take several corners of side-by-side racing to execute and may or may not succeed, when you can just save up all your hybrid energy, push the overtake button, get the DRS and drive past on the straight?
It's not a fundamentally bad idea, but it needs to be used in a carefully measured way to offset partially the loss of aero performance cars get when they run close to their competitor. So when you lose ground in the fast corners, the DRS should get you back in touch and back in business so that, if you're good enough, you can make a proper pass. It should not do more than that, and too often now it makes the attacker's job easier than it should be, and easier than it would be in a category like GTE, where the cars have a lot less aero so don't lose much performance by racing at close quarters, but also don't have push-to-pass or Super Mario Flap.
Edited by redreni, 18 September 2014 - 07:27.