Bob Barnard Track Engineering

The final corner onto the straight at Interlagos, home of the Brazilian F1 GP, has always bothered me. The drivers cut across pit entry to get a faster line on basically a blind corner, and then the wall on the exit of the corner is right on the edge of the pavement. We have seen crashes here in F1, but not as many as you would expect, so it was one of those deals that seemed OK even if it looked bad. Well, I should remember my own words, if it looks bad it probably is. A motorcyclist died earlier this year and last weekend there was a fatality in a stock car race, the third fatality on four years, at a time when racing is generally being spared. There are now calls to modify the corner, but the problem is not easy to fix. The track is very close to the boundary of the property on the outside, and there is a steep drop off on the inside. The corner is great and re-profiling it would not be appreciated by the drivers, but nor would dying. Not a simple fix.

Jean Todt is flagging a revisit to the fees CVC, aka Bernie, paid for the hundred year commercial rights to F1. The fight over engines is apparently just an opening salvo, and Jean is giving notice he is standing for re-election. I bet Bernie will be working away behind the scenes to put his own man in there.

I love the fact that the Russina GP track is "well on track." Well the race is three years away so why shouldn't it be? The best bit is the "Final Feasibility Study" is going to the IOC. Last time I looked they did not run F1 races. And wouldn't you do the feasibility study before you signed a contract for millions of dollars to stage an F1 race? Silly me, this is just the study to make sure you can run a Winter Olympics and an F1 race within a few months of each other, not whether it is going to make money. We all know that answer don't we?

Has everyone caught up with what McLaren were trying to do with their trick exhaust before they gave up and copied Red Bull? "The Octopus" was what it was called. Instead of collecting the exhaust into two pipes from eight, it split them up and fed them into areas of the underfloor to provide the perfect exhaust diffuser. It was all a bit too complicated, and like a lot of complicated things in F1, they could not get it to work. Some of the best cars have been the simplest, the FW07 for instance. Don't think they have forgotten it though, so look for a revisit sometime this year.