Wouldn’t they all be flooring it? If the lane is straight how does one driver speed up and pass another?
Edit: straight aways
In: Engineering
Slipstream and DRS.
F1 aerodynamics produce massive amount of downforce to keep the car sticks to the road when going through corner at high speed. However, this downforce also creates drag. On straight lane, you don’t need that downforce, you care more about the speed. So you’d want to lower the downforce to lower the drag, which make your car goes faster.
F1 cars also creates “wakes”. Simply saying, wake is a turbulent air behind the car. This turbulent air usually have lower pressure than the ambient air around it.
By going behind this low pressure air, your car will have lower downforce, and in turn, lower drag, so you can have higher top speed. This is called slipstreaming (or drafting in NASCAR). This is also why you’ll see driver tailing their opponents, to take advantage of the wake and gain speed.
Then there’s also DRS (Drag Reduction System). It simply opens up the rear wing to reduce the drag from the rear wing. DRS can be only activated on pre-determined straights, and when the driver is close enough (less than 1 second) behind another car.
TL;DR: by going behind the opponent, the chasing car will have lower drag and can go faster. If they’re close enough, the chasing car can also have DRS to even reduce the drag.
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