DRS OP

We all know that DRS trains are a thing in real life, we get that. But currently in F1 23 the difference in how fast you can go in a race with DRS vs without is simply crazy.

In reality we've seen many times that due to dirty air, drivers will be able to drive up to the back of a slower car while in free air, but then struggle to get past without a pretty significant performance/laptime delta advantage because of the dirty air, and even have to fall back OUT of drs due to overheating. And conversely we've seen that it's sometimes better for a car to hang on to another's DRS in a train in order to stop faster cars behind from being able to overtake rather than trying to overtake the car ahead and be left without the drs speed advantage to defend.

However, in the current game, the lack of dirty air effect and the tyres/car NOT starting to overheat after sitting right up another cars rear wing for lap after lap, has created a situation where we can essentially find MASSIVE time advantage by just hanging onto the back of much faster cars, vs running in free air.

With the new games significant buff to drs effect, it is now so bad that a car that is right at or very near the bottom of the performance index can latch onto the back of a top end car and with just slightly clever use of ERS stay in DRS with that car lap after lap after lap. In some cases this can mean a race lap time gain of over 1 SECOND!

As an example, I've just done race 2 (Jeddha) my team career race in 2nd worst rated car. No assists, controller, default setup, no significant corner cutting/extending, ultimate difficulty, qualified just outside the top 10. 

Come the race I was able sneak into p9 through the lap 1 carnage and then for the rest of the 1st half of the race I could keep drs to Alonso in the Aston Martin fairly easily and lap with the top 10 cars without problem. While faster cars behind me without DRS fell further away every lap, including my teammate.

After the pitstops I came out just a little too far back to grab the DRS, and subsequently my lap times got sooo much worse that Alonso and the top 10 drove off and the train behind then started gaining about 0.5 to 1 second a lap!. As soon as Lando in the much faster mclaren got in DRS he drove past the 1st chance he got. But then what happened? Well obviously I grabbed onto Lando's DRS and suddenly I was not only lapping easily with him, 0.5+ a lap faster than before, but I was even having to NOT take opportunities to re pass him in the drs zones because of the massive straight line speed advantage I now had coz he had no DRS. 

I know many are going to not like this, but I think we need some kind of adjustment, or at least just something we can turn on if we want, to lessen the massive advantage we currently have of sitting in DRS of waaay faster cars without any penalty.

Personally, I would suggest 2 changes to fix this and make the game more realistic. Wouldn't even need to do both to massively help. 1) increase the dirty air effect, at least just enough so that on tracks that aren't known for being all about straight line speed and instead have downforce requiring corners, that being in free air is actually a good thing, so we actually WANT to get past cars to go FASTER. And 2) make it so if we have the full tyre temp sim setting turned on (surface and carcus temps) that the tyres will start to get hotter the longer we sit right up behind another car through all the bends, so that we have an incentive to either get on and try to PASS the car ahead, or we have to consider dropping back a bit to prolong tyre life. 

Maybe it's just me, but I'm already bored of just having to focus all my energy on having DRS all the time to be competitive. I know the E-sports drivers would 100% agree after watching the drs train bore fests the last 2 years. 🙂