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Revising Sochi’s Turn 2 to be like Bahrain’s opening complex is a mooted solution to a trouble hotspot that Carlos Sainz Jr said “shouldn’t exist” after his Russian Grand Prix crash.
McLaren Formula 1 driver Sainz wiped himself out of the race on lap one after he took to the run-off at Turn 2, misjudged his entry speed to the makeshift chicane in the ‘rejoin lane’ and tore his front left wheel off by hitting the concrete wall on the outside.
Sochi’s Turn 2 has been a problem since the circuit’s debut in 2014 because it is a tight, slow right-hander that then flicks left at the end of an ultra-long flat out section and has an enormous amount of run-off on the left-hand side.
The FIA’s chosen solution to that problem is to demand drivers to drive between bollards wide into the run-off before rejoining the circuit.
While track limits penalties for not doing so have been a common consequence of that corner, and Romain Grosjean wiped out the bollards during the Russian GP, Sainz is the first to crash as a result of the array of blocks.
Sainz accepted his “mistake”, explaining that he “went around the bollard with a very, very narrow angle and misjudged my entry speed and hit the wall pretty heavily”.
But he insisted: “I still think that corner shouldn’t exist. It’s not a very nice corner to drive around and generally it’s [creating] this kind of situation.
“I think that corner is not very well designed. It’s forcing the drivers to take very strange lines and very strange incidents like this, five-second penalties that we are given if we don’t negotiate that chicane next to a wall.”
The outside of Turn 2 is a peculiar arrangement of sausage kerbs and drivers feel that this makes it difficult to achieve what the FIA mandates for that corner.
There is a long sausage kerb separating the astro-turf on the immediate outside of the corner from the run-off, and another short sausage kerb directly on the apex as the track goes left.
Making the bollards at an easy angle, while still losing time, is not a problem if a driver goes deep into Turn 2 and crosses the main sausage kerb.
But they are also instructed to navigate the bollards in the run-off if they have any part of the car to the left of the orange apex sausage kerb too, even though it has no performance benefit because the kerb unsettles the car significantly.
Over the weekend many drivers failed to take to the run-off as required by the FIA’s instructions after hitting that apex kerb, with Daniel Ricciardo getting a five-second time penalty in the race for doing so.
“The geometry is weird,” said Ricciardo. “My situation, for example, I locked up so I was like, it’s gonna be tight, but it’s just the way it shaped it leaves you with hope till the very last second.
“By the point you’ve committed, you can’t really go back across, you’d lose probably more than five seconds. So I guess there’s that point of no return. I’d got to that and I just said alright, I’ll just go and if I get a penalty, then obviously I’ll suck it up.
“I think to be honest, Turn 2, a few of us drivers have been vocal. They could do something better with it in general, I think even just to allow more overtaking for example, maybe a different shaped corner, less of such a short apex.
“They’ve got quite a bit of room to play with. So we have talked about it in the past, and maybe that would also eliminate the issue that we’re having with this cut-through.”
Williams driver George Russell suggested reprofiling the corner, which he called “one of the worst on the calendar”, so it is similar to the first sequence of turns in Bahrain.
At the Sakhir circuit, the long-start finish straight ends with a tight hairpin that brings the track back on itself before a fairly tight left-hander.
It creates Bahrain’s primary overtaking opportunity and there are no issues with drivers taking to the run-off on the outside and gaining time, so the FIA does not have to specify instructions like at Sochi.
Russell said of Sochi’s Turn 2: “For racing, it is a terrible design.
“I actually suggested this in a drivers’ briefing earlier in the season that we’ve got the room and the space to create almost a Bahrain-style Turn 1 and Turn 2, almost a hairpin into a kink.
“Firstly allow drivers to lunge one another into Turn 1, to give better racing, and also it will avoid people having to cut the track.”
