Perhaps Fernando Alonso should make his Formula 1 comeback a couple of races early for this year’s second race in Bahrain given his oval experience and the way the ‘outer’ circuit configuration has been described?
But no, I can assure you that despite the description of it as an ‘almost-oval’ the track layout is vastly different to a real oval.
That said, I’m very pleased F1 is actually trying something genuinely different and it’s going to make this race weekend well worth watching.
There are too many direction changes to go the oval route on set-up
Top speeds will be high and it will require Monza wing levels to achieve that, but there are still slow and medium corners to cope with.
In that regard, it’s got far more in common with Monza despite being a very different shape.
To me, an oval is when you more or less just turn the steering wheel in one direction – other, that is, than when you are heading for the wall and trying to get away without a big impact.
Ovals are not easy, as I’m sure Alonso will confirm after his experience at Indianapolis last weekend, but Bahrain is still just another track that requires its own compromises to get the best from the car.
On an oval, you run the car to turn in one direction. Side-to-side, everything is different – cambers, casters, toe, tyre pressures, spring rates and corner weights are all optimised to give maximum grip mid-corner.
Actually, a good car on an oval should be difficult to drive on the straight but more or less go around the corner without too much effort from the driver. If you have to force the car you normally end up being in the wall.
With this track, there are too many direction changes to go the oval route on set-up. It will be high-speed and there will be lots of laps, so potentially lots of overtaking.
Unfortunately, the majority of it will be done with my least liked part of F1 – the dreaded DRS. It will mean most of the overtaking will be drive-bys on the straights, as usual.
There is plenty of rest time for the driver down the straights, but not so much for the engine. That means reliability at this late in the season might just be something that rears its ugly head.
The estimated lap time is around 55 seconds, the lowest we’ve seen in F1. The shortest oval I ever worked at engineering a car was Sanair in Canada. It was a seven-eighths of a mile tri-oval (three corners) with a lap time of 17 seconds and 200 laps! Running a car for that gets your attention.
What the Bahrain outer circuit does do is generate some different challenges for the teams.
I would hate to think that in these troubled times, both sporting and financially, they will all go off and have to design and build new wing set-ups just for this track.
It would be easy to stop this by mandating that you have to run the rear wing assembly you race at Monza. At least that would mean staying within the components you already have on the shelf and would control the costs.
