Mercedes’ “Double DRS” Develepment Race dead already?
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Given that Mercedes are clearly not (Monaco qualy aside) destroying the field even in qualification, let alone seemingly overtaking more easily than the rest of the field in the DRS zones: do you think that many, if any of the teams are exploring this area of advantage any more?
Even the smallest teams can have great technical innovation. Just because it doesn’t put them always at the front doesn’t mean it doesn’t make a difference and isn’t worth copying, it just might be that the rest of the car is a bit weak in some respects.
Yes, but is it now clear that the development costs for a team to add it to a car retrospectively and probably less effectively than Mercedes, do not justify themselves for the maybe limited performance gains. Are not there more performance/cost avenues to go down for other teams. Will they now bother to persue the Double DRS?
I don’t think they will bother spending time on it.
Clearly it isn’t the holy grail of performance, and with the tyres being so important, I think they are spending their money on chassis and suspension modifications that will make the tyres last longer, while still maintaining speed, and of cause the key area, aerodynamics.
I think teams like McLaren and Ferrari will have it on their cars for next year though, when they have better time and resources to incorporate it in the car properly. I doubt Red Bull will be pursuing it though.
I don’t think Newey will sacrifice the perfectly packaged rear end for such a system unless it packs a serious performance gain.And it seems pretty clear that standard DRS is overly adequate in the races themselves anyways. Any car that gets into the DRS zone seems to breeze by on most tracks. It largely only of any real use in qualy. It would be very interesting to see how Mercedes would be placed in qualifying with their system removed.
I’d be surprised if many of them investigated it further from Melbourne.
There was a great quote from Franz Tost in 2010 in regard to the much vaunted F-Duct something along the lines of “If I had $5 and I was hungry I’d buy a sandwich, not 5 grams of caviar” – effectively “we’ll develop what will get the most bang-for-buck”
The thing is there is very little gain from it. It’s 3, maybe 4 tenths at most over a qualifying lap, with DRS open just about every straight. In the race it’s not even there unless your DRS is open, which is considerably less than how much it’s open in qualifying.
Couple that with the amount of time you need to fine tune the system, it’s a very, very bad investment.
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