Formula 1 drivers will be allowed to make more use of their Drag Reduction Systems at the Chinese Grand Prix this year.
The FIA has extended one of the two zones in which drivers may activate DRS at the Shanghai International Circuit.The zone that runs along the back straight has been extended by 75 metres. This has been done by moving the activation point closer to the exit of turn 13. This straight is one of the longest on the calendar, measuring 1,170 metres, and leads into a sharp right-hand hairpin, turn 14.
The detection point for this zone remains at turn 12. The other DRS zone is unchanged, with a detection point 35 metres before the final corner and activation point 98 metres after it.
The change means the DRS zone is now longer than it was for F1’s last race at the circuit before the Covid-19 pandemic in 2019. That was prior to the 2022 technical regulations change which was intended to allow cars to race together more closely.
The Shanghai track is hosting its second sprint event this year. Formula One Management says it selects circuits that have great overtaking potential for sprint races. Extending the DRS zone will make it easier for drivers to pass.
The FIA confirmed other changes to the track since last year. Its entire 5.451-kilometre length has been resurfaced ahead of this weekend.
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New ‘combination’ kerbs have been added at the apexes of turns two, six, 10, 11 and 16. In order to make the track boundaries clearer, blue lines have been painted at turns six, nine, 10, 14 and 16, and the white line has been repositioned at turns 10 and 16.
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2025 Chinese Grand Prix
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dutchtreat (@dutchtreat)
20th March 2025, 12:32
That kills the racing for me. What is wrong with no DRS. Have a real race where passing is a skill.
Jere (@jerejj)
20th March 2025, 13:29
This move is good, especially after all that unnecessarily excessive shortening that happened within the last two seasons despite following getting harder season by season, not to mention DRS has never been OP on Shanghai’s back straight.
Therefore, the activation zone starting 75 meters earlier is a wise move to counteract 2025 cars being worse at following than 2024 cars, i.e., the only current aero-cycle ones to race in Shanghai.
Extending activation zone lengths was a thing especially in 2017 & ’18 to counteract following getting harder season by season within stable technical regulations, so people shouldn’t be upset if more & more zones receive earlier starting points this season with the following being worse than in all the last three seasons & will only keep getting worse until the next technical regulation changes.
Roger Ayles (@roger-ayles)
20th March 2025, 14:11
It has pretty consistently been far too powerful on this straight and it’s even led Croft & Brundle who usually defend DRS (And ever other awful gimmick thats been thrown at F1 because they are clearly all show over sport now) criticising the length of it on that straight basically every year.
Most DRS assisted passes at this track are completed well before they even get to the braking markers with the passing car been able to easily pull back onto the racing line ahead of the passed car before they need to think about braking.
Jere (@jerejj)
20th March 2025, 15:02
@roger-ayles Not to my memory.
Easy-looking passes have only happened rarely at best, which isn’t the same as a frequent thing like with Kemmel straight.
Jere (@jerejj)
20th March 2025, 13:24
I was already positively surprised that all of Albert Park’s activation zone starting points remained unchanged, even the one on the longest full-throttle section, so I was even more positively surprised when I found out yesterday that Shanghai’s back straight zone’s starting point had been moved earlier instead of remaining unchanged (which was my minimum hope), or getting pushed further onto the straight.
All DRS-era Chinese GPs to date had the starting point located 450 meters after T13, so starting at 375 after the reference corner is the first & will be the only ever activation zone starting point change for the Shanghai International Circuit.
I hope this zone length increase means that out of all zones that received shortening within the last two seasons, at least the Miami & Imola ones would return to their original/previous starting points, & hopefully, also Losail’s (which Marques himself did after Wittich had already done shortening before).
Suzuka, Monaco, Hungaroring, Zandvoort, & Singapore probably won’t feature any alterations this season either, & all in all, all the remaining ones from Suzuka until Yas Marina should at the very least have the starting points unchanged from last season or before instead of receiving any further shortening with following at its hardest within the current aero cycle.
Simon
21st March 2025, 0:17
With all these words you are really impressing us (sarcasm)
Philippe (@philippe)
20th March 2025, 13:29
Passing should never be easy. So many times, the driver making the pass has done it so early that he can come back to racing line before braking and corner entry. That is wrong and boring. It kills the racing. I would rather have 5 meaningfull, dramatic and exciting overtakes per race, then having 50 boring ones. I can’t believe we’ve been stuck with this DRS nonsense for 14 years. This was suppose to be temporary.
Jere (@jerejj)
20th March 2025, 13:31
Easy-passing has never been a thing in China & DRS will be gone for good after this season in case you forgot, but I agree that earlier opportunities to get rid of it should’ve been used, i.e., the 2017 & 2022 aero changes.
Philippe (@philippe)
20th March 2025, 14:18
True that China is difficult. The only exciting Chinese GP that came to mind all had rain, haha!
Yeah, I was very happy when I learned that DRS was going to be scrapped next year. Then I kept reading the article and saw that it will be replaced by an ERS boost (Manual Override mode)…
Jere (@jerejj)
20th March 2025, 15:04
@philippe Although Manual Override Mode works similarly to ERS & KERS, meaning that it’ll be usable throughout a lap in all sessions rather than only in designated portions, even if only for the attacking driver when close behind over the timing line.
S Arkazam
20th March 2025, 19:23
MoM is worse than DRS.
It remains an unfair aid, but as opposed to DRS we cannot see it.
MichaelN
20th March 2025, 17:27
Rather, DRS will be permanent. The moving wing will be used at all times and is needed to decrease the time it takes to reach speeds at which the output of the MGU-K is capped, and as such, prevent the ES from running out.
albo94
20th March 2025, 13:44
Your reasoning is wrong.
You say that you prefer “5 meaningful, dramatic and exciting” overtakes per race to 50 boring ones. But the truth is that without DRS, the only overtaking would be between cars on completely different strategies (old vs new tyres) or between cars out of position (McLaren vs Haas).
This was the case 95% of the time from the mid-90s to 2010. The only exceptions were races in dump/wet conditions.
BORING.
albo94
20th March 2025, 13:48
I’ll make an example: Without DRS, there wouldn’t have been a fight between Norris and Verstappen because the former wouldn’t have had the means to attack Verstappen in the dirty air without the help of DRS.
Philippe (@philippe)
20th March 2025, 14:14
I agree that modern cars are the problem. Way more dirty air than before.
Not to mention that they are way too big and too heavy.
albo94
20th March 2025, 14:45
Exactly.
I am not a DRS fan, but I consider it inevitable with this GEN of cars.
Philippe (@philippe)
20th March 2025, 14:12
I stand by that overtaking should never be EASY.
This is Formula 1. These are the best drivers in the world. Things should not be made easier for them, for the sake of “the show” and entertainement. I want to see a sport, a competition.
Another thing that is exciting to me, about no DRS, is not knowing if the driver behind will be able to make the pass. And even if he can’t make the move, but he’s trying every lap, and you don’t know what’s going to happen, it’s exciting! Like Imola 2005, with Alonso and Schumacer.
And when you see great overtaking, like Räikkonen on Fisichella in Suzuka 2005, or Häkkinen on Schumacher in Spa 2000, it’s so cool because the overtake is spectacular, it’s rare, and you could not know if he was going to pull it off or not.
The inevibility of the pass, and the fact that it is usually done before the braking zone is what is boring to me.
I realised, when I was writing my first comment, the part that we’ve had DRS for 14 years now, that a whole generation of fans have never seen F1 without DRS. So hey, maybe I’m just a long time fan, missing what F1 used to be about.
albo94
20th March 2025, 14:20
The “inevitability of the pass”. Going back to my example, did Norris overtake Verstappen in Austria 2024?
Philippe (@philippe)
20th March 2025, 14:24
Well, no. They collided.
Coventry Climax
20th March 2025, 16:03
I agree.
That there’s people here calling themselves F1 fans and support DRS (and Sprints, for that matter) is completely beyond me, but then I’m of the pre-DRS (and pre-spec) generation too.
And then there’s people that come up with the exception to prove the rule wrong.
Same reasoning in reverse: Look! This dime is bent! All dimes are low quality and not up to the job!
Personal opinion: That’s ‘social’ media generation, likely. No attention span, no sound reasoning, no knowledge, no context, but man are they loud.
albo94
20th March 2025, 16:23
This is offensive from you. Why can’t you deal with different opinions? F1 purists hate DRS like the plague. But F1 purists are probably a tiny percentage of the fanbase. They are actually louder than the younger generations because they are the ones complaining about DRS, sprints etc.
Coventy Climax
20th March 2025, 16:42
Like I said; no knowledge.
I like coffee better than tea. That’s an opinion. Feel free to have any of those.
‘Your reasoning is wrong.’ That’s not an opinion, that’s an argument.
Leksa (@leksa)
20th March 2025, 16:00
DRS “passes” are not overtakes, but clinical procedures where skills are not needed. I’d rather see million multi-lap fights (that may end without an overtake) than a single DRS “pass” where driver being passed can’t do anything about it. The day DRS is ditched, I’ll pop the champagne.
Coventry Climax
20th March 2025, 16:05
You must dislike champagne. ;-)
S Arkazam
20th March 2025, 13:46
If that doesn’t work they can try a stop sign for the leading car.
Roger Ayles (@roger-ayles)
20th March 2025, 14:05
Silly move, especially considering that DRS was never needed on this straight to begin with given how it had always been a place that saw a lot of good slip streaming & overtaking without it.
If they want to use this awful, anti-racing gimmick that produces fake & far too often boringly easy push of a button passes then put in only in places where it may actually create overtaking possibilities that may not be realistic without it. By putting really long DRS zones on the longest straights that always produced good slip-streaming & overtaking even without DRS all they are doing is ensuring that we won’t get to see any real racing & actually exciting overtaking.
That has always been the biggest issue with it’s placement & the thing that has destroyed more races than it’s helped, especially on this circuit and places like Baku & Spa where it’s also not needed to those long straights that are already good in terms of the slipstream alone (As you see on first laps & other laps where DRS is disabled).
Dex
20th March 2025, 14:16
Why would anyone wish to make it even easier? I still naively think, sometimes, that this is F1. Racing without defending isn’t racing at all. It’s regular traffic.
Philippe (@philippe)
20th March 2025, 14:21
100% agree. It’s like a highway pass.
Most DRS passes are just a change of position, before the braking zone.
Jere (@jerejj)
20th March 2025, 15:07
Dex Following has gotten harder season by season since 2022, so moving the starting point earlier is a wise move to minimize the naturally increasing DRS train effect, not to mention activation zone shortening has been an unnecessarily frequently occurring thing post-2022, so with this season being the worst for following within the current aero cycle, every single activation zone should either get extended or stay unchanged rather than getting shortened any further, which should’ve already stopped for good after the 2023 season.
MichaelN
20th March 2025, 17:23
Wise was what Tombazis promised in the summer of 2023, when he said: “We are studying solutions for 2025. We have identified some parts of the cars to act on (…). It is clear we no longer have the advantage of 2022, and therefore we know that there is work to be done.”
And what work have they done? More DRS.
Wonderful.
Coventry Climax
20th March 2025, 15:51
Whatever view you hold on passing and DRS, easy/difficult, boring/exciting(?) :
This effectively says that the groundeffect as the solution to cars being able to follow one another closely, is completely dead and a failure.
Personally, I blame both Mercedes/Wolff and the FiA, for complaining and giving into it respectively, for this failure, due to a certain Technical Directive I don’t even care to remember the number of, but regarded the bouncing issues that Mercedes proved unable to solve for way too long, where some of the competition had no issues at all, and others solved it way quicker.
MichaelN
20th March 2025, 17:15
Mercedes could solve it, but they didn’t want to because it would make them (even) slower.
Wolff basically spend the whole year complaining that the bouncing was dangerous to his drivers, while also making sure his team made none of the changes it could have to reduce the bouncing and, supposedly, protect his drivers.
Coventry Climax
20th March 2025, 17:45
Yeah I know, and it’s actually what I meant/implied.
Instead of going for a solution, they chose to do the child act with the FiA and the FiA fell for it, basically molesting the ground effect in the process.
StefMeister (@stefmeister)
20th March 2025, 16:57
DRS is one of the primary reasons I care less about F1 now than I did before it because it’s completely altered the way drivers go racing in a way which I simply don’t enjoy as much as what we had before.
Seeing a driver pull up to the car ahead, Get to the DRS zone push a button & then just breeze easily past is something I have never & will never enjoy and in-fact that always takes away from my enjoyment of races because I have no interest in simply seeing a lot of unexciting passes.
I want to see good racing, competitive racing with some good battling & should any overtake occur I want it to be down the to the skill of the driver, be exciting to watch, maybe make me go ‘wow that was great’ & be as memorable as possible & for me no DRS overtake has ever done any of that.
For me simply having a lot more overtaking doesn’t mean we are getting better racing because racing & my enjoyment of it doesn’t come down to how many cars passes other cars in a race & I think the biggest problem today is that for many it has become about quantity rather than quality & thats a shame.
ECWDanSelby (@ecwdanselby)
21st March 2025, 8:27
COTD – nail on head.
Is this and the noise for me… neither make me excited to watch any more!
MichaelN
20th March 2025, 17:14
This is a good move, and Ross Brawn was right again when he said: “staying where we were was just going to get worse and worse.”
Oh wait, that wasn’t about China, that was about the 2021 cars. You know, those awful cars that needed DRS to follow each other. Let’s skip ahead to this part: “the data shows the cars could race, the cars are much less impacted by following another car.” Yeah, remember that? That was fun.
It’s incredible that we have 10 teams spending a collective billion euro to build race cars that… can’t race. Brawn and his Liberty friends had their go, and the 2022 cars is what they came up with. It’s time to let someone else have a try because this isn’t working.
More DRS in the fourth year of these cars? After Brawn promised they would change the rules if it got out of hand?
Really? Ugh.
Coventry Climax
20th March 2025, 17:58
Thank you, that about sums it up!
LyndaMarks
20th March 2025, 22:39
The teams are doing exactly what the goal is supposed to be which is designing a race car to be better than the others by as big a margin as possible.
Colin Chapman never built a car that was designed to be good in terms of racing, he built cars designed to be as fast as possible and to be faster than the competition by as much as possible.
The only problem with what Ross & Liberty tried to do was that what they wanted to do simply wasn’t F1 and so it was never going to work. The show over sport fans need to accept this and just stop watching if F1 been a sport is something they don’t like it. Plenty of other series aimed at been a show you could watch instead.
Just go away and leave F1 to the fans that actually understand what the SPORT is supposed to be about!
DB-C90 (@dbradock)
21st March 2025, 0:37
One of the main problems that there is now isn’t that cars can’t follow it’s the incredible volume of marbles that appear off line because of the made to degrade tyres.
It’s pretty much impossible for cars to go off line or try a different line to attack a car in front. This in turn removes the ability of drivers to actually try different things when harassing the driver in front. It’s pretty much a case of stay on the clean line or you’ll lose a huge amount of pace while you clean up your tyres.
Perhaps they need to look at that first, then we can get rid of the awful DRS passes.
ECWDanSelby (@ecwdanselby)
21st March 2025, 8:26
Who on earth EVER saw this as an issue that needed addressing? Incredibly frustrating. That’s zapped some enjoyment for me.