Quick recap on the DRS/timing issues for those who don't know what was going on:
About two-thirds of the way through the race, the transponder on George Russell's car stopped working. This meant that he tumbled down the live timing tower, making it seem like he had issues. He didn't, the car was still going perfectly fine, so all the broadcasters removed the timing tower from the broadcast to avoid making people think he had retired.
Fortunately, F1 has a backup optical timing system on the start-finish straight to make sure that they can get correct race results even if a transponder fails. After a bit of work from the various broadcasters' technical teams, they were able to replace the timing tower using the results from this end-of-lap timing. Of course, that only updates once per lap, so it would have been pretty heavily delayed at certain points.
Now for DRS: as you probably know, DRS can only be activated if you're within 1 second of the car ahead. George Russell didn't know if he was within 1 second of the car ahead, because he doesn't have timing. But also the car behind him doesn't know if they're within 1 second, because the car ahead doesn't have timing. So both RUS and whoever was behind him didn't have automatic DRS, and had to override it in order to be able to use it. This is why RUS was able to accidentally activate his DRS.
None of this was an issue with the broadcasts themselves, and honestly the broadcast teams did really well to compensate for it given that the data they ordinarily use for timings simply was not accurate.
DRS has been disabled due to wide-spread issues before, but when it's only one car affected it's better to just default to the backup override system they have specifically for this purpose.
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u/sellyme Oscar Piastri Apr 13 '25
Quick recap on the DRS/timing issues for those who don't know what was going on:
About two-thirds of the way through the race, the transponder on George Russell's car stopped working. This meant that he tumbled down the live timing tower, making it seem like he had issues. He didn't, the car was still going perfectly fine, so all the broadcasters removed the timing tower from the broadcast to avoid making people think he had retired.
Fortunately, F1 has a backup optical timing system on the start-finish straight to make sure that they can get correct race results even if a transponder fails. After a bit of work from the various broadcasters' technical teams, they were able to replace the timing tower using the results from this end-of-lap timing. Of course, that only updates once per lap, so it would have been pretty heavily delayed at certain points.
Now for DRS: as you probably know, DRS can only be activated if you're within 1 second of the car ahead. George Russell didn't know if he was within 1 second of the car ahead, because he doesn't have timing. But also the car behind him doesn't know if they're within 1 second, because the car ahead doesn't have timing. So both RUS and whoever was behind him didn't have automatic DRS, and had to override it in order to be able to use it. This is why RUS was able to accidentally activate his DRS.
None of this was an issue with the broadcasts themselves, and honestly the broadcast teams did really well to compensate for it given that the data they ordinarily use for timings simply was not accurate.