If the FIA and the teams are not providing opportunities, what's stopping fans from taking the initiative? Otherwise, they're like my Year 7 students - they give up the moment they don't know the answer, and then complain that the questions are too hard.
What initiative? This isn't petitioning the government to do something or staging protests.
The FIA and the teams have no obligation whatsoever to listen to us, what matters to them first is that they all continue to run their respective companies profitibly (and in the case of the FIA, that they simply continue to exist). Secondly is to run a fair competition between themselves.
The only thing that makes anyone change anything is viewing figures and attendance. Thats not something that can be organised easily and there are people that don't agree.
We tune in to watch their sport. Its not a publicly owned or run sport. All we can do is threaten not to buy into it.
To be fair, the DRS enables cars to remain close behind in instances such as this. This means that the driver is in a position to overtake in other parts of the track. A lot of the Pirelli overtakes we have seen may have been a result of the DRS closing the drivers up after a corner and a straight which usually seperates them for the rest of the lap.
That is of course, just speculation as I do not believe for one moment that the Pirelli tyres didn't have an effect. But I do believe that even when the DRS didn't directly create any overtakes, it allowed the cars to run closer and maybe created overtaking opportunities in the corners following the DRS zone. Take Abu Dhabi as an example, we saw battles and overtakes between various drivers on the corners following the second DRS zone. Whilst the overtakes themselves were superficial, it did close the cars up allowing some wheel to wheel driving in the corners. We also saw the same in Korea between Hamilton and Webber.
And we know how close Schumacher got to Perez at Singapore, the DRS contributed to that, he wouldn't have been anywhere near otherwise.
The DRS has been a mixed success. I'm not sure that further things can be done to improve the racing aside from changing the aerodynamic characteristics of the cars, but the teams are unwilling to support such a change for various reasons. For many team members it means their jobs could be at stake.
We saw only one battle after the second DRS at Abu Dhabi if I remember right - Button and Webber.
A better example would be Malaysia, where there was almost more overtaking in the rest of the lap than there was at the DRS part. While yes, there is an advantage to bringing cars closer to then overtake in another section of track, its still a very minor gain that only really benefits certain track layouts. As soon as they get to a medium or high-speed corner, they start to all spread out again.
What I am saying is why not solve the original problem?! I originally thought DRS would be a stop-gap till they brought in the ground effects regulations. But now the noises being made suggest they think they've solved it just with DRS. DRS doesn't solve the problem, the problem is still there.
As the teams started getting used to the Pirellis and the races got more processional, there were less overtakes outside of DRS zones. Seems to me tyres were the biggest role in creating interesting races at the start of the season, not DRS.
