The Enstone-based outfit lodged an official protest to FIA stewards on the Thursday of the Chinese Grand Prix weekend over the legality of Mercedes much-discussed system - which channels air through internal pipes from the rear of car to help stall the front wing when the DRS is activated - but the claim was thrown out by the governing body's representatives who were again happy that it was inside the regulations.

With Lotus having vowed not to take the issue on to the FIA's Court of Appeal, teams are now faced with the decision of whether or not to incorporate similar systems into their existing designs in order to gain the same apparent lap-time benefit Mercedes are enjoying in qualifying in particular, when DRS use is unrestricted.

Asked in an interview on Lotus's official website if the team now had their own 'double DRS' in the pipeline, Allison said they first had to work out how powerful they could conceivably make such a system - while he interestingly added that simply designing a carbon copy of Mercedes' layout wasn't potentially the only option available to teams.

"We are at the point of making estimates of how big the gain might be and assessing the difficulty in actually realising that gain," he said.

"It's anyone's guess how powerful any existing system is, but that's not the issue; it's how powerful we think we can make any system which we can develop now we know how the rules can be interpreted.

"There are systems like Mercedes has, but the interpretation allows other permutations too. So it could be an interesting time for developments in this area."

Lotus introduced several upgrades onto the E20 in Shanghai in a bid to improve the car's performance but Allison says difficulties keeping the tyres in the correct temperature window made it difficult for the team to really assess how the new parts were performing.

"We weren't able to unlock the pace we thought we had brought with the upgrades and that was frustrating," he explained.

"It was a very awkward weekend and not just for us. We were dealing with a tyre that was just popping in and out of the edge of its operating window from a temperature point of view. That made it ever-so-hard to make coherent decisions about whether what you had done to the car was a good thing or a bad thing. That was confusing for us, but we pulled everything reasonably back together."

But while the team's best race result remains fifth so far in 2012, Allison added: "This weekend just reinforces the feeling we've had in the first two races, that there is a lot of goodness to come this season with this car. We are going to start scoring points in a decent way very soon."