'Track design to blame for lack of overtaking'

Tuesday 10th November 2009

Finally, someone is making sense as Williams' tech director Sam Michael admits it's not the cars, rather it's the tracks, that are preventing overtaking in F1.

This year's Championship saw a whole host of new regulations introduced governing the design of the cars in the hope that Formula One would see more overtaking.

But it didn't happen.

Instead, races turned into boring processions that even the lights, opulence and the longest straight in F1 at the season-ending Abu Dhabi GP could do nothing to rectify.

But it's not the cars that are at fault. Rather, Michael says, it's the design of the tracks.

"I think that clearly the (rule) changes made the cars easier to follow, however, there's a lot of work that still needs to be done," he said.

"One of the things that wasn't addressed in the 2009 rule changes was circuit design. If you look at tracks like Barcelona where no one overtakes and take exactly the same cars to tracks like Monza, Hockenheim etc, there's plenty of overtaking. The difference is circuit layout.

"Organisers need to look closer at creating slower speed corners which feed onto straights and at removing chicanes.

"If you look at somewhere like Abu Dhabi, there are some good aspects to the circuit, but there are fundamental mistakes. There wasn't good enough racing there and the organisers need to rectify that before next year.

"You can't keep blaming car design. The FIA are looking into this now and will hopefully solve the problem."

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