From DRS to Straight Mode: How Melbourne's overtaking zones have been reinvented

Formula 1 has revealed the Straight Mode zones for the 2026 Australian Grand Prix, which kicks off the season this weekend in Melbourne, and with the reveal comes a lot of questions about how the racing will actually work.

For more than a decade, the Drag Reduction System (DRS) defined how overtaking worked in Formula 1.

The concept was straightforward enough: if a pursuing driver closed to within one second of the car ahead at a designated detection point, they were permitted to open a slot in the rear wing on the following straight, reducing aerodynamic drag and boosting top speed by roughly 6-9mph (10-15km/h).

At Melbourne’s Albert Park circuit, the 2025 configuration featured two detection zones, each triggering two successive DRS-enabled straights, giving drivers four opportunities per lap to open their rear wing and gain a top speed advantage.

This configuration had been in place since 2022, when the Albert Park layout was reprofiled, and a fourth DRS zone was added for the first time in F1 history, along the new sweeping run created after the removal of the Turn 9-10 chicane.

It was a layout that rewarded the chasing car in two separate phases of the lap, giving drivers opportunities to mount an attack.

The 2026 circuit map tells a very different story from its predecessor — and a more expansive one.

Rather than four DRS zones confined to specific straights, the circuit will feature five separate Straight Mode sections highlighted in red above.

They appear on the Sector 1 straight between Turns 2 and 3, along the western loop around Turns 5 and 6, down the long sweeping Sector 2 descent after Turn 8, through the section around Turns 10 and 11, and along the pit straight where the Overtake system is also active.

That represents a significant expansion of where low-drag running is permitted compared to the DRS era, and it reflects the fundamentally different nature of the new system.

Placing the 2025 and 2026 circuit maps together, the scale of the change becomes immediately apparent.

The 2025 DRS zones were confined and relatively short — the purple coloured sections cover only a fraction of the circuit’s length.

The 2026 red lines, by contrast, appear across large portions of the lap, covering sections that under the old regulations drivers would have navigated in full downforce with the rear wing firmly closed.

One detail of continuity is worth noting. The old DRS detection zone 2, towards the end of the lap in the 2025 configuration, sits almost exactly where the new Overtake Detection point appears on the 2026 map, with the Overtake activation point just around the corner at Turn 14.

The geography of the opportunity on the pit straight is essentially unchanged; what has changed is everything around it.

The speed trap position near Turn 1 is also consistent, which will allow for a direct year-on-year comparison of peak straight-line speeds.

That will be one of the more instructive data points of the opening weekend, given that the 2026 power units feature a near 50/50 split between internal combustion and electrical output, and the aerodynamic drag characteristics of the new cars are quite different in nature from anything seen in the DRS era.

A more unpredictable race?

Mercedes’ deputy technical director Simone Resta, speaking ahead of the season, captured the shift well. “We are all used to a certain format with the DRS that helps with overtaking and is used in defined areas and with certain gaps,” he said, “but next year, every driver will be running moveable front and rear wings together, at many points in the lap, and they will be using the energy to help overtaking. It’s going to be different and potentially quite more unpredictable.”

That unpredictability cuts both ways.

DRS was visible and legible: you could see the wing open, you knew which straight it applied to, and the television graphics made the activation clear. With Straight Mode permitted across five sections of the Albert Park lap, the low-drag running will be far more pervasive – but also less obvious to the naked eye. Overtake Mode, the energy deployment element, adds another layer of strategic complexity that will take time for fans, broadcasters and perhaps even the drivers themselves to fully read in real time.

The proliferation of Straight Mode sections also raises an intriguing possibility: overtakes in places Albert Park has simply never seen them.