"Wheelerguy" (wheelerguy)
10/27/2016 at 19:30 • Filed to: Hermann Tilke, St. Petersburg
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"Wheelerguy" (wheelerguy)
10/27/2016 at 19:30 • Filed to: Hermann Tilke, St. Petersburg | 0
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Well, it’s not totally an F1 circuit, !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , but still.
avens
> Wheelerguy
10/27/2016 at 04:16 |
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He’s made other good ones, and some great ones even. A1 Ring, Sepang and Bahrain (his first works) are some of the best circuits out there and favorites of the actual drivers. Those show he is skillful enough to design a good circuit.
It’s just that there will never be a new circuit comparable to Spa, Nordscheleife, Monza or Suzuka, because of safety regulations and that there’s not as much money in racing as it used to be. He is obviously capable of making fun classic chicanes and 300km/h corners, but those are prohibited so he can’t put them. His first circuits included very technical corners, but the circuits that came after couldn’t feature such shapes. Then, the mentioned four circuits clearly cost several times more than any Tilkeedrome, bar the Abu Dhabi circuit, which limits creativity.
That last one is a good example of design limitations making the track boring. Because the circuit has an hotel in the middle of it, the layout had to be extra duper safe and square-shaped. With those limitations it’s impossible to make a fun international-level circuit.
Another example of limitations, now about costs, is that in the past circuits were made in the outskirts of the outskirts of the rural side of the country, so land cost and space wasn’t an issue nor something to be considered. Nowadays tracks are made as close to cities as possible, making them in the end as compact as possible, without the possibility of featuring interesting designs. If you walk around Suzuka Circuit you’ll see that to this day, 55 years since opening, it still is located in the middle of nowhere and the area used for the whole complex is immense. That’s why it was possible to have immensily long corners back then, of the fun type, whereas now if Tilke were to try that he would have to think of how much that corner costs in comparison to others.
Tilke is not the problem and he is not a bad track designer. The thing is I cannot think of one international level circuit made in the 2000s that is good to great, made by any designer. They all have a couple of somewhat interesting corners and that’s it. The circuits of every major current track designer (not only Tilke’s) lack the flow of classic circuits, because it’s now practically mandatory to have start-stop sections, plus they don’t have a single great corner, comparable with the classics.
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Wheelerguy
> avens
10/27/2016 at 05:27 |
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First... I could have sworn you would mention Istanbul Park as Good Tilke, too. But let’s agree to disagree and say Turn 8 there is helluva fun if you got a 24-car drift train (more fun if they hit all 4 apexes).
Second... your comment just plain vexed me about my track-making chops. I have 36 designs here (none are scaled in any way), and in retrospect, I just ran into the same blunders, if not repeated it over and over.
But it does make me wonder: why focus on the layout itself? Wouldn’t adjustments to camber and elevation be enough to turn a drab corner into enough of a challenge or crucial passing spots, or is this a shitty idealization?
AntiSpeed
> avens
10/27/2016 at 19:44 |
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Didn’t Tilke do the transformation of Spa?
RallyWrench
> Wheelerguy
10/27/2016 at 19:48 |
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Let’s be fair here, no one has passed on it yet.