Lewis Hamilton noted that the shortened DRS zone at the Circuit de Catalunya made overtaking more challenging for drivers during the race. The activation point for the DRS zone on the pit straight was moved 100 meters further away from the final corner compared to the previous year.
Despite this, the Mercedes driver successfully passed Carlos Sainz Jr. into turn one, a maneuver that team principal Toto Wolff described as one of “the best overtakes I’ve seen in a long time.”
“They shortened the DRS, so it was not so easy to follow through the last corner,” Hamilton told the official F1 channel. “I really had to pull this move off as early as possible. He moved over but didn’t completely cover the inside, so I went for the inside. It was very, very close between us, he tried to hold and stay on the outside, I left him a little bit of room, but it was nice and tight.”
The FIA had previously experimented with shortening DRS zones at various tracks early last year but stopped after drivers complained. In the third year of F1’s current technical regulations, drivers have increasingly warned that following other cars is becoming more difficult due to the turbulence they produce.
Lando Norris echoed these sentiments, explaining how the turbulence affected his ability to attack George Russell during the first stint after Max Verstappen overtook the Mercedes.
“There’s so much dirty air,” Norris said. “The first three laps of a stint, you can [attack] because the tyres are so good. So at the beginning of a stint, I was good and I could, but that was Max’s opportunity to get past George, and he did that.
“After, the tyres just get so hot, you just can’t do different lines, and you can’t go out of the dirty air and cut back and things like that. So there was nothing else I could have done. It was just as simple as everyone kind of falls in line a little bit.”
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