The super duper grippy tarmac doesn’t do jack squat, it’s a hoax. Grosjean and Ericsson both made the Fence, there was a heavy accident there when TCR Euro was there where a car shot across the runoff straight to the Fence.
The pavement is there because it’s a test track, and testers want to be able to make mistakes with zero punishment.
For a race track, and furthermore one hosting F1 with the “best drivers in the world”, it’s a terrible idea. The made a laughing stock of the white painted lines on lap 1, with close to 10 drivers cutting significant potions of the track to “avoid debris”.
Damn it man....HIT THE DEBRIS!! Or slow down enough to drive around it. I think it’s pathetic that in an online race, max would never have been allowed to cut the circuit like that, the AI policing track limits would never allow it. Yet in the real, the “best drivers in the world” are allowed to do it.
A little bit of pavement where Vettel and Bottas ended up would be ok, but at least break it up so that cars can’t just go through at high speed. Even a wall of poly stirene blocks that the drivers had to drive around would have been better than nothing. Max didn’t even lift
Watch a replay of the start, and look how many cars are off the road going into T5.
I see a lot of people complain a lot of predictable running order in F1.....but when drivers make significant errors which would/should cause a major shuffle of the running order, many times, the paved runnoff makes the mistake negligible - or drivers who would have otherwise been caught behind someone else’s mess (and therefor be vulnerable to being overtaken) just cut across the runoff with barely a lift, and the running order doesn’t really change much at all.
I get the upsides of the paved runoff, but I just don’t think anyone in the sport takes it seriously. It’s a joke. To me, if you’re going to have paved runoff, fine, but track limits need to be policed in a way that maintains the “spirit of a gravel trap”. That is to say, if you have to put all 4 wheels into the paved runoff, for ANY reason, then it’s an automatic drive through penalty, maybe even a stop and go. People would say it’s unrealistically harsh, but in my view, the alternative is being stuck in a gravel trap, being caught in someone else’s accident, being in the wall, or at the very least having your radiator ducts full of grass and gravel. So, the paved runoff allows the race to keep running if there’s a spin, keeps cars in the race, but there is still serious consequences for making a mistake, and the desire to “bail out” of any situation and cut across the runoff is eliminated.
