Drag reduction system

And oh, by the way, while they're doing all this, The drivers are sitting there racing against each other, trying to pass each other or defend against the pass.

There's this thing called the DRS, which is called the drag reduction system.

Basically what that does is that it flattens out the top element of the rear wing and reduces drag very significantly to allow a car that is within a second of the car in front of it to flatten out that rear wing and go much faster to a straight line to aid then in making a pass down a long straightaway.

So there's certain designated areas where you can open that DRS system up.

And so the drivers, the moment they get into that DRS zone, as they call it, they they pop open the rear wing and line down the straightaway.

So how is that related to slipstream?

Slipstream is basically where the car in front of another car is basically punching a hole in the air and it's creating a vacuum behind it.

You know, we talk about this probably needing a car that's one and a half seconds to two seconds a lap faster to overtake somebody.

I don't know where that number comes from, but all I know is that, you know, with what we have now, with being able to use the extra power or as it was DRS in the past, you had to be within one second of the car in front of you.

By the time you get to one second of the car in front of you, you're destroying your tires.

That's the problem.

It's, um, it's a, a nice short question compared to our last one.

But, um, yeah, the...

If you imagine the, the conventional design, in other words, the, the DRS solution as such that, that the majority of teams started the season with, um, when, when the, the flaps open up as they do on, you know, as I say, quite a few of the cars in the normal stance, that flap arrangement, those two flaps opening up, still generates a flow, a turning flow that gives you some downforce on it.

And what we've always talked about is the wings talking to each other, whenever the, the main wing talks to a beam wing or back in the days whenever we used to have a little mid wing in there.

Yahoo! You can actually hear this in a race.

Listen for DRS here.

Now, Charles Leclerc is gonna have DRS to try and fight it back.

Taken together, an F1 car is just a symphony of aerodynamics.

[upbeat music]I actually got to see them up close and personal when I was in Miami.

The fact that this movable aero stuff is such a significant thing now since it's come back into Formula One, it's quite interesting to imagine what would have happened if it stayed legal, because it was outlawed basically a few years before you started in Formula One in 1973.

And there'd have been a lot of things learned, wouldn't there, in terms of movable aero and legal flexible arrow you could argue over the years I also feel that would have come at the risk of well the certainty of probably quite a lot of dreadful accidents so it was probably inevitable it was going to get banned but it's an example of how the regulation in Formula One has left some areas untapped hasn't it because although going as far back as 2009, we had a bit of movable aero with that front wing flap adjustment that you could do a couple of times a lap, and then DRS.

It's never been a kind of full-blown fact of life in Formula 1, has it?

It's never been a full-blown fact.

And then that overtake button, the activation is at the exit of the turn.

So no DRS, obviously, in the traditional sense.

But we'll see how the cars fare.

I'm interested in the weather because this is, it's not a track I feel like this time of year when it gets laid out is particularly crazy hot.

Sure, that works.

All right, Rob, shall we kick it off?

All right, Mark writes, is F1 too proud slash stubborn to accept that push to pass is a much more fun system than DRS and whatever the hell the season is calling it? Oh, boy.

Love the podcast.

distributing it between four temperature-sensitive tires, and keeping it predictable while the vehicle moves through a constantly changing three-dimensional flow field.

DRS and Active Aerodynamics Movable surfaces trade load for lower drag only under tightly controlled conditions because a mistimed change can upset vehicle balance.

DRS and Active Aerodynamics Movable surfaces trade load for lower drag only under tightly controlled conditions because a mistimed change can upset vehicle balance.

At racing speed, the body is not merely passing through air.

It is manufacturing a pressure field that becomes part of the suspension system.