I see it as a small flap that opens up and it speeds up the cars by a large margin. How does something so small like a flap provide that much of a boost?
In: Engineering
F1 cars are a balance between top speed and downforce. If you look at the stats for many of the races you’ll notice that the fastest cars often have the slowest top-speed. This is because they have sacrificed top speed for downforce.
Downforce glues the car to the track and helps breaking an accelerating, so the cars are better in the corners.
Wings though come with a drag penalty. The more wing you have on the car the more drag and the cars gets slower.
As an F1 car gets faster the wings produce more downforce as there’s more air moving over the wings. Because of this once an F1 car is at top speed the rear wing isn’t as necessary anymore.
So if you could deactivate it you would get more top speed. That is what DRS does, it neutralizes the rear wing which reduces drag and increases the cars top speed by around 5-10km/h.
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