The Formula 1 calendar development threadFormula 1
- Thread starter prisonermonkeys
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- ukfan758
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Yes the first corner is the only dicey one. The rest of the corners are either at much lower speeds or have a very wide road surface.
Here is a 2003 Jordan going round the track qualifying speed...and those cars were monsters!
Oh and check out the pits!
I don't see the "very wide road surface"...
I imagine the FIA having issues with both of the high speed kinks on the bottom of the track. They would both be pretty much 7th gear flat out, which is pretty nuts with zero runoff.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see it...I just don't see it happening
Same old story as always....would fantastic if done right, but I hope they don't 🤬 that place up by paving everything within 5 square km.
Also, would F1 cars be able to follow each other around there?
The thing with Monaco is it's only on the calendar because of it's heritage. There is absolutely no way on earth it would be certified for F1 racing today as a new track and that is the same thing with Macau. F1 has strict safety regulations and Macau is miles away from them.
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Didn't they already do that when they shortened it the first time?
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Some might say so, but I wouldn't agree. The late 90s re-design was a more than decent compromise: Tarzan, Hugenholtz and Scheivlak survived intact and the new sections are not half bad.
A fast circuit like the old Zandvoort was never going to survive indefinitely without safety alterations. The old Scheckter chicane was already a poor addition (with regards to the flow of the circuit), and had the old layout persisted, the Panorama "chicane" (which was always more of a medium-speed S-turn, which I like) likely would have eventually been tightened.
Alterations for modern F1 is an entirely different proposition. The gravel traps, the camber and the trademark curbs would almost certainly disappear and likely many of the lovable corners would be at risk.
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They did a pretty good job with Mexico City. Okay, the final stadium section wasn't great, but when they reprofiled the Esses, they kept the original character of the corners and did it in such a way that they weren't aero-dependent.
If Zandvoort were to return, it would likely need a rebuild. There's plenty of space just north of the circuit, so those loveable corners that you think would be at risk could easily be recreated there.
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Very true. We jump on Tilke's neck a lot, but maybe he's simply working within the confines he's given, and does the best with what he has to work with.Are we sure it's not the FIA's ridiculous safety standards that lead to those things?
^Tilke designed track in Atlanta.
It always easy to play the blame game when we have no idea what goes on behind closed doors.
So that said, maybe Tilke himself wouldn't mess up Zandvoort, but I do believe the FIA's requirements for it to be upgraded to a Grade 1 circuit would negatively change the character of the track beyond recognition, whether it's Tilke or someone else who oversees the redesign.
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In a modern Formula 1 car, keeping the lomg, rounded corners would have thinned the field out. Even when you take the elevation of the circuit into account, the cars are generating considerably more downforce than they did in 1992. They would not have been able to run close to one another, and then you would be complaining about the processional race.
One of the reasons why Istanbul Park worked so well was because Tilke was consulted on which piece of land to buy. Tavo Hellmund had a similar idea with Austin. But then you get the likes of Shanghai, where the government set aside a patch of land without so much as a second thought.
The problem Zandvoort faces is that when it was rebuilt, it was rebuilt as a touring car circuit first. There were no plans to revive the Dutch Grand Prix. So there are a few parts that stand out in my mind - namely the double hairpin at the top of the circuit and the chicane at the bottom of the next straight - that wouldn't work. It wouldn't be hard to bypass them without compromising the design of the circuit and adding an extra loop onto the start of the lap to make it five or six kilometres long.
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That touches on one of my biggest gripes about redesigning these old circuits for modern F1.
If the circuit was designed with TC and GT cars in mind, then maybe it should stay that way. I get upset by the idea of a track like Zandvoort being redone to suit the needs of 1 series who comes to town once a year, and on a whim, may decide to not come back for 20 years.
Personally, I would much rather see Zandvoort stay as a world class TC/GT track which gets used every weekend.
But then again, maybe the revenue from 1 GP per year would be enough to make the track profitable, allowing the owners to continue to make improvements which benefit all users of the track blah blah blah...can't have my cake and eat it too
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- TenEightyOne
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Earl, Miller, Tornaco, Marimon, Alborghetti, Ayulo, Vukovich, Castelotti, Andrews, O'Connor, Musson, Collins, Evans, Unser Jr, Cortner, Schell, Bristow, Stacey, Summers, Cabianca, von Trips, Rodriguez, Hocking, de Beaufort, Taylor, Bandini, Anderson, Schlesser, Mitter, Brain, Courage, Rindy, Siffert, Williamson, Cevery, Revson, Koinigg, Donohue, Pryce, McGuire, Peterson, Depailler, Villeneuve, Paletti, de Angelis, Ratzenberger, Senna, Bianchi...
...stupid FIA, sticking their noses in for no reason.
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I could produce a list of pro skiers and pro snowboards twice as long as that spanning half the time period. We don't like death, but at the same time, we don't go around flattening and paving all the mountains we ride.
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- TenEightyOne
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Your suggestions are slightly facetious but taken at face value I'd note that safety research for skiers is far from having been abandoned. Motorsport is dangerous, as is skiing. Why allow them to be more so through inaction?
**** happens, right?
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Cool link 👍 Last time I checked, there were no position of "Mountain flattener" within the ISSS.
I'm also equating F1 drivers to the top level, Big Mountain Riders (ie heli-drops in AK, etc), not to little Timmy on the bunny hill.
In big mountain riding, we use comprehensive preparation, support, and communication to increase safety (scouting, track walk, driver's meeting, radio comms with your support team). At the very most, we will asses Avalanche conditions and maybe blow off some charges to clear any imminent danger (course marshals clearing off the track), or if conditions are poor, we'll go home and try another day (red flagged due to weather or other circumstances).
Riders routinely ride lines which have killed other riders. Riders routinely stand at the top of a mountain and call off the run at the last second, down anything including a bad gut feeling. But never, NEVER, will a rider look at a mountain and say that they would like to ride it, but only if all the dangerous obstacles are flattened or removed.
In case my analogy is muttled, to be clear, the racetracks are the mountains! We can't go around flattening every one of them just because someone died while participating in an extremely dangerous activity. We'll end up racing Big Wheels in bouncy castles if we keep going down that road.
So please, don't try to make it seem like I'm in the position of wanting no investment in safety and that I want racing (or skiing for that matter) to be a blood sport. There are other ways to increase safety without drastically compromising the tracks. And also, like you said, motor racing is dangerous. In my opinion, that's a pill that, today, not enough people within the sport are willing to swallow.
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- GTP_daan
1/2 the track is a 4 lane wide road! It's wider than most circuits.
And the other half of the track is like this... I seriously cannot comprehend that someone can watch the Jordan going round the track and think it is wide enough, and safe enough, for an F1 race.
Yes, he made it round the hairpin, but he had to coast to do it. There are also buildings all round it so it's not a simple job to make it wider.
Note the real pinch point too, which is where the white car is behind the light blue one.
You also cannot use Monaco as an example as we all know that if the race didn't exist and they were to turn up today with the idea of holding a race round that circuit they would be laughed at, and even Monaco isn't as tight and narrow as that.
Hosting an F1 race at the Guia circuit in Macau is a ludicrous suggestion.
Even if you were to ignore the safety aspect the chances of it putting on a good race are extremely slim. Sure, it'd be a spectacle watching cars lap such a circuit but once that novelty wore off you'd only need to watch each lap they got to the first corner where either a) someone pulled off a genuine, ballsy overtake or b) someone attempted a pass that was never on in a month of Sundays and crashed, probably causing a red flag. Spoiler: The latter is far more likely.
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C'mon man!
First, I know that you're informed enough to know that there are areas aside from track development which can increase safety. The new Virtual Safetycar is a great example.
Secondly, populating that calender with "safe" tracks is one thing, populating it with parking lots is another.
Look at the paradigm we're stuck in right now. One one hand, you have drivers and teams pushing for more power, more speed, "we want to go faster faster faster", but at the same time, they keep asking to have the guard rails pushed farther back. You know, you can travel extremely fast in Outter Space, and there's lots of runoff up there. How much runoff is required to make a track "safe". And that's today, what about in another 10 years when the cars are faster, will we have to continue to increase the runoff?
Lastly, everyone involved in racing is only human and posses that beautiful ability to turn a blind eye to safety standards if something else trumps it. What could trump safety? How about heritage.
We all know Monaco is a grade 2 circuit, but F1 makes an exception, because Monaco.
Le Mans is a grade 2 circuit, but the WEC makes an exception. They could very easily move the 24hr race to somewhere like Paul Ricard, but they won't, because people are too attached to the heritage, despite the increased danger of racing on a track like Le Mans. The WEC also took steps to increase safety aside from just track development - the first thing that pops to mind is limiting the LMP1 cars to 1000hp to control their speeds.
There are a lot of options available aside from what seems to be the current standard of "angular corners with miles of paved runoff".
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- TenEightyOne
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@twitcher, I quite agree with most of what you say... the thing that I most disagreed with was your impression of speed - "what happens when they get faster?". Speed has always been limited in F1, this current regulation set demonstrates only one of many "resets" that have occurred through history. I daresay the cars could already be halving 90s lap times if development (and the Formula) had been unfettered.
There's a point where you have to accept that some racing conditions aren't sustainable over 200 miles (or maybe even survivable), there's a point where you have to mitigate insurance liability for the people who actually pay for the race to happen (the spectators), there's a point where you have to say that failing to mitigate against conditions with clearly lethal potential goes beyond simple oversight and becomes a wilfully dangerous lack of responsibility
There's a point where you have to accept that some racing conditions aren't sustainable over 200 miles (or maybe even survivable), there's a point where you have to mitigate insurance liability for the people who actually pay for the race to happen (the spectators), there's a point where you have to say that failing to mitigate against conditions with clearly lethal potential goes beyond simple oversight and becomes a wilfully dangerous lack of responsibility
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There is such a thing as overkill though. I also wonder how many of those deaths would have happened even on the safest modern track as the car's were seemingly extremely unsafe in the past.
