Thursday, October 21, 2010 at 11:59AM
It will be great to see some action on the Korean track after all the talk and surmising. There are still mixed messages coming out and you can read them on ESPN F1 and Autosport.com as easily as I can repeat them. There is a nice piece by a journalist on ESPN F1 about the trip and the "love" hotel, usually rented by the hour, but quite nice. The photos of the activity on the main straight remind me of a street race rather than a permanent circuit, but as long as it is ready tomorrow that's OK. I liked the quote for the organizers that "We can hardly expect to be perfect from the outset." Well yes you can actually if you know what you are doing or get the right people in to do it, which is what Tilke did in the end to get it finished. He is confident the track will stay down, and has obviously used the strongest, and most expensive, binder to lay it, but hey, it's only money.
Some of the walls look close to me and in odd spots. Liuzzi has commented on this and others say it looks like Valencia street circuit in places. As they are building a city in and around it then I guess that is what it is. It follows on Abu Dhabi where they said the moved the walls in closer, banking on the TecPro barriers to work. They may well do, but I think the drivers are a bit more cautious when the run off is less than they usually have, which results in a procession rather than a race. Did we see anyone overtake at Abu Dhabi last year?
Enough of the talk, SPEED Channel is streaming practice at 9pm EST in the US. You can work out what that is where you are, about nine hours from now. The BS stops when the rubber hits the road.
In other news, well not news, Kimi crashed again, and Hulkenburg will probably lose his ride despite a good season to Maldanado who has a wallet the size of Yamamoto's. The V8Supercars are due to race at Surfers Paradise as a replacement for IRL, shades of Long Beach when they dumped F1. V8's will be a better show, but we in the US will be unlikely to see it.
Reader Comments (4)
Bob,
You mean to say that you dont get the V8's ? If you believed their marketing push, you would think that the whole world gets them. I never Bathurst on TV when I used to travel in Asia for work either.
I was reading the yesterday, that the V8 organisers have yet to announce their 2011 calender. Some delay in sorting things out over in the middle east. Maybe the people there are realising that running V8s to a crowd of a 1,000 or so isn't a viable proposition.
Remember, the V8's went to China in 2005, and never went back. I recall that the Chinese declined to have them back .
We did get a one hour special on Bathurst a week later, and I have seen the Bahrain and Abu Dhabi races, but they are on at such odd times you miss them unless you check every day. SPEED is so filled up with "reality" TV junk it is hard to know what's on.
That series of turns in Korea leading onto the pit straight are right up against cement barriers. I can see this in a street race, due to space constraints, but here?
I agree, not much I do like the look of actually. Someone is going to have a big accident here if they are really racing, we've seen a few close calls at that pit in so far.