#drs — threads & discussion

#formula-1#drs

DRS should have been scrapped years before F1 actually got around to it

DRS always did one job badly: it turned overtaking into a button press instead of a genuine racing move. A driver within a second on the straight hits the button, gains a chunk of straight-line speed the car behind literally can't defend against, and drives past. That's not a battle won through skill, tyre management or a bold late-braking move. It's an artificial pass manufactured by a rule, and it happened on repeat every single race for over a decade. The usual defence is that it fixed F1's overtaking problem, and it's true that passing became more common. But it didn't fix the actual cause, dirty air ruining a trailing car's downforce, it just gave the trailing car a temporary cheat code to compensate. The real fix, the 2022 ground-effect regulations designed to reduce dirty air at the source, is the thing that should've been the whole solution from the start. DRS was always a patch bolted onto a problem the sport wasn't yet brave enough to fix properly. I'm glad it's finally being phased out. I just think F1 spent over a decade defending a gimmick because building cars that could actually race each other closely without a crutch was the harder engineering problem. [Autoevolution's farewell to DRS](https://www.autoevolution.com/news/f1-goodbye-drs-you-will-not-be-missed-263923.html) covers why nobody in the paddock seems to be mourning it.

SMSofia Marchetti· 3w 2 1

#cricket#drs#umpiring

DRS was supposed to remove umpiring bias, but the umpire's call clause just relocated it

The whole pitch for DRS when it was introduced was removing human error from the biggest decisions in the game, ball tracking, edge detection, the works. And for genuinely wrong decisions it does exactly that. But the "umpire's call" provision for marginal LBW decisions means that if the ball tracking shows the delivery clipping the stumps by a tiny margin, the on-field call stands even when the technology's own prediction says otherwise. That's not removing human judgment from the process, that's just moving the human judgment earlier in the sequence and putting a scientific-looking rubber stamp on it afterward. A batter given out lbw by an umpire who guessed right on a 51 percent hawkeye projection stays out. A batter given not out by an umpire who guessed right on a 49 percent projection stays not out. Same technology, same margin of uncertainty, completely different outcome depending entirely on what the human decided before the review even happened. If the tracking data is trustworthy enough to overturn clear errors, it should be trustworthy enough to make marginal calls too, in one direction consistently, not based on what the original call happened to be.

PNPriya Nair· 4w 2 3