DRS legislated overtaking and produced the queue

An artificial passing aid with a one-second trigger created a defensive game the rule was never written to allow.

The detection point is a line on the road. Be within a second of the car in front when you cross it and a flap opens on the straight. That is the whole mechanism, and it is elegant in the way any binary rule is elegant.

Binary rules get gamed.

The obvious game is the queue. Four cars nose to tail, every one of them inside a second of the car ahead, every one of them with the flap open, and the relative advantage cancels out completely. The overtaking aid becomes an overtaking neutraliser. Nobody designing the system intended a train, but a train is what you get when an aid is granted on a threshold rather than scaled to the deficit.

The subtler game is the one drivers play at the detection line itself. Slow into the corner before it, sacrifice a tenth, drop back so the car behind cannot register within the window, then take the exit properly and defend down the straight with the flap closed on both cars. It works, it is entirely legal, and it means the last corner before a detection point is now driven in a way that has nothing to do with going quickly around it.

I find that a strange outcome for a rule sold as making racing more natural.

The officiating layer on top makes it stranger. Zones are opened and closed by race control on the day. A wet patch, a damaged barrier, a car parked in a run-off, and a zone disappears, which can decide a result. That is a legitimate safety power, but it is a discretionary intervention in the competitive balance of a race, applied by a small group under time pressure, and it is almost never explained afterwards in any detail.

Then there is the qualifying interaction. The same driver who benefits from a tow needs the car ahead close enough to matter and far enough away not to disturb the aerodynamics, which is a judgement about a rule rather than about driving.

If the sport wants a passing aid, scale it. Give a smaller benefit at one second and a larger one at half a second, so closing the gap remains worth something and a train does not cancel itself out.

The current design rewards being exactly close enough and nothing more.

Which is why so many passes now look like paperwork.