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 covers why nobody in the paddock seems to be mourning it.