Lotus unlikely to race double DRS

Lotus technical director James Allison has revealed that it is unlikely that the innovative double DRS device trailed on a number of occasions this season will actually race before the end of the year.

The team had hoped to compete with the device before running into a series of issues and has shelved work on it until next week's Young Driver Test at Yas Marina, when Davide Valsecchi, Edoardo Mortara and Nicolas Prost will used the double DRS during their time on track.

However, despite that plan, Allison admits that he doesn't expect the device to see the light of day in a racing environment given the issues that have been encountered thus far.

"Our plan is to work on understanding how to make it act in a sufficiently predictable manner to be deployable in a race," he said. "Given the difficulty we have experienced so far, I think it would be optimistic to see it used in anger this season, within the final races remaining."

While the double DRS has been shelved, Lotus will continue with its new Coand effect exhaust system in Abu Dhabi, with Allison revealing that updates were set to be introduced which would help the team recover some of the power that had been lost since making the change from a more conventional design.

"We aim to introduce an exhaust pipe that keeps all of the Coand downforce benefit, but sheds some of the horsepower penalty that we suffered with for our first iteration design," he said. "Our first version of the Coand system is rather power hungry. With Renault Sport's help we expect to claw back around one third of the loss in Abu Dhabi, and would be able to get around half of the loss back eventually."

Allison also added that he was optimistic that the Enstone-based team could secure a strong result in Abu Dhabi, even though the circuit isn't one that will play to the strengths of the team's car.

"Yas Marina doesn't have a very wide range of corners, and in fact they are all rather slow speed," he said. "This hasn't been our favourite type of track over the season as a whole, but it is not dissimilar to Valencia and we went pretty well there."