USGP is back??

http://www.formula1.com/news/headlin...0/5/10824.html

 

great, another street circuit with no overtaking. can't wait. <yawn>

Why not Watkins Glen? VIR? Road America? Laguna? Sebring?

or Maple Valley?

 

Naw, As I understand it they are suppose to build a proper F1 track... Film at 11...

I would have prefered the race to be in Las Vegas or SoCal though!

 

I agree Las vegas would have been great. The fact is it will only be a 5 hour drive to Austin, but time will tell.

 

The good news is that Herman Tilke is going to design a proper, modern road circuit, not a street circuit. The Austin area has some hill country topography for this, while Las Vegas is flatter than a 9 year-old girl.

My problem with Austin is two-fold, and I think I can say why because I have lived and worked there in the past...

The airport there is the former Bergstrom Air Force Base. Currently, none of the commercial carriers fly large (Jumbo) aircraft into Bergstrom Int'l. You can think of Bergstrom as a regional airport, International in name only.

The F1 circus commutes using several converted Boeing 747s. It's not been shown yet, whether Bergstrom's runways are long enough to allow landings and (especially) takeoffs with fully laden 747s.

If it is proven that the airport can't handle the 747 caravan, then the options are to fly into Dallas or Houston and truck the circus 230 miles+ to/from Austin. Including loading and unloading, this will add a full day to the schedule at each end of the race weekend, and the pampered F1 community will not like this. Bernie is slipping in his old age, as he should have asked this question of his good buddy Austin promoter before giving the green light.

Secondly, if the USGP is to run sequentially with the Canadian race in Montreal, as is tradition, then I think a June race in Austin is problamatic due to the heat. Think back to the disastrous 1984 Dallas GP, (and the Las Vegas GP too for that matter) and you realize that 100º plus venues in summertime don't work.

Previous USGPs (Watkins Glen, Detroit, Long Beach) had long and prosperous careers as Summer races because of their locations... Long Beach on the temperate west coast and the others because they are both about as far north as you can go in the US, where the Summers are more tolerable. But Austin in June is almost as hot as Phoenix (or pick any southern, semi-arid/desert location).

Unless Tilke plans and gets approval to bust the budget with a full concrete racing surface, I'm afraid the track will wilt in the Summer heat, as it did in Dallas.

 

I agree, the Austin airport is small. The humidity and heat will be bad, but race fans put up with this.

I think the centralized location will make this race appealing.

I'm thinking they break tradition with the Montreal race.

Ed

 

If you like all your overtaking to occur in the pits, then this is your guy.

I have very little hope that Hermann Tilke will be able to design a track that will be able to provide for exciting racing. If you don't believe me, google his name and "boring".

Now I'm disappointed that there won't be a boring street race, at least it would be cool to see downtown zooming by.

 

IMO, the overtaking debate if boring. F1 is not about NASCAR type racing, it's about technology and innovation (of lack thereof).

The reason why there is so little overtaking in F1 has to do with car design, not track design.

Back in the day, when each designer was given free reign to innovate, you had lots of overtaking, because the cars were so different from team to team. In today's super regulated environment, the cars are mandated to be so similar, that they perform aerodynamically nearly the same, with engines limited to the same RPMs, etc. One knows the slippery slope has been exceeded when there are whole paragrapghs in the sporting regs on where you must place a rear-view mirror.

Political correctness and a quest for "fairness" is so prevalent today, that one car is not allowed to dominate without changing the rules so the others can catch up. This yields the "kit car" formula that you see now... in just about every open-wheel formula. Absent any paint schemes and logos, etc., you can't tell a Ferrari from a Mercedes today.

There used to be loads of passing at the older circuits like Spa, Monza, Silverstone, Imola (RIP). There have been few changes to these tracks over time, yet passing has become rare, as the the cars have become homogenized.

 

why do you even watch?

My solution to the problem you explain is to remove *all* wings of any kind. Wing, winglet, splitter, all gone (ok, maybe a small splitter will be fine). If the surface is not a "smooth" part of the body (no peninsulas sticking out, no wings on uprights), then it should be illegal. Openings, in addition to cooling, could be used for tunneling airflow as long as the "roof" of the tunnel does not become a wing (how the hell do you regulate *that*! ) Aerodynamic instability problem solved. I will leave it up to an engineer to define "smooth part of the body" and "tunnel" in legalese worthy of inclusion in the sporting regs.

And don't get me started on flappy-paddle gearboxes...

 

The economic feasibility of this is near zero.

It's all about paying Bernie a fortune, so much so that Indy wouldn't re-up.

There will NEVER be a better location for a USA F1 race than Indy.

Let's hope that Texans maintain their usual smarts and refuse any public funding for this sure-to-be boondoggle.

 

I believe I was attempting to offer a counterpoint to your suggestion why today's tracks are "boring." I've followed F1 since the Jimmy Clark days, and have every race recorded since 1982. I think I appreciate the sport for all its nuances... the tracks, the cars, the drivers...

As for your comments about removing wings from F1 cars to improve racing, I have advocated this for years...

July, 2009 - https://mbworld.org/forums/3608720-post8.html

July 2002 - https://mbworld.org/forums/92896-post3.html