The old tracks are the best: 2020 F1 season has exposed bland circuits

I guess it’s a by-product of age mixed with experience that makes greybeards such as myself tend to dismiss the modern superlatives presently showered around like confetti in praise of a motor-racing achievement, or event, or venue which one holds in little personal esteem.

Where circuits are concerned this surfaced within me while watching Lewis Hamilton match Michael Schumacher’s career total of 91 World Championship-qualifying GP victories in the Eifel Grand Prix at what current commentators seem to consider the ‘iconic’ short-lap ersatz Nürburgring.

I didn’t so much mind the commentators, and even some relatively recently retired ex-F1 drivers-turned-pundits, praising the ‘new Nürburgring’ as I feel sad that current drivers were loudly declaring how ‘good’ the circuit was on which to drive, and what ‘fun’ its challenge presented. But of course, all such assessments are merely relative to what they have known before…

The general consensus of current F1 driver opinion after the Tuscan GP was that they considered ‘the new’ Mugello circuit also to be ‘terrific’ and ‘challenging’ and – again ‘really fun’ – and ‘really fulfilling’.

What has happened in effect is simply that the ravages of the Covid pandemic, combined with the praiseworthy enterprise of Liberty Formula 1 and its current management (plus I must admit the FIA sanctioning body), forced a new look, a new calendar and some long-overdue re-thinking about World Championship Formula 1 venue selection for this peculiar year.

Is a win still dazzling and wonderful if it’s at boring Bahrain… or Sochi?

I imagine that future historians may well look back upon 2020 and see it as having been a sea-change season. For some years now, the backers of several near-featureless, forgettable and highly artificial autodromes within nation states of pretty questionable record have invested heavily in a grand prix calendar slot to project some measure of assumed global prestige. The practical-minded reward-centric Mr E of course would always take his train set to the best-paying potential host, regardless of how unkind they might be to public critics, minorities or even small furry animals. Several, over the years of his reign, seemed like willing lambs to the slaughter. Several others made hosting a Formula 1 round work well enough for them. What the enthusiast spectator made of it all, especially the play-mat courses, spray-painted onto hundreds of acres of hazard-free Tarmac, was never a significant consideration.

But lifelong enthusiasts may take a broader view. Is a win a dazzling performance, a great fightback, a wonderful duel (remember them?), as impressive an achievement, as superhuman a drive if the stage upon which we witnessed it was boring Bahrain, or dispiriting Abu Dhabi, or Shanghai… or Sochi… when so many other more challenging, more scenic, more atmospheric venues are around?

This is what has made even the interim-period artificial circuits such as Mugello and the Nürburgring Großer Preis-Strecke now seem such fun – largely because they were built to less proscriptive requirements than those more recently applied to new-builds. The current Mugello Autodrome was opened in 1974 after the 41-mile Mugello public-road circuit – including the Giogo and Futa Passes – had been legislated out of racing in 1970. Similarly, the current ersatz Nürburgring was opened in 1984, replacing the genuinely iconic adjacent 14-mile Nordschleife which, thankfully, was at least preserved for less demanding customers’ enjoyment and deep, deep satisfaction.

Of course even the Nordschleife was itself an artificial circuit of its day, built during the dire German recession years of the Weimar Republic largely as an unemployment-relief programme in the poverty-stricken Eifel area, and first opened in 1927. So the term ‘artificial’ need itself be no condemnation.

Indeed, the recent Circuit of the Americas (opened 2012) outside Austin, Texas, is already well regarded, while Spa-Francorchamps, even in its shortened form first adopted in 1981, remains special – thanks largely to its undulating situation in the Hautes Fagnes hills, and two-thirds of it following the course of once-public roads rather than some architect’s adherence to FIA corner radii and other regulation restraints.

The classical Nürburgring Nordschleife was itself abandoned by F1 after the 1976 German Grand Prix in which Niki Lauda suffered his fiery and near-fatal accident in the Ferrari 312T2 most likely caused by a rear- suspension failure. Harsh criticism of the ‘over-long’ circuit’s safety provisions, despite having already been extensively updated and modernised in 1970, then crystallised into an irresistible move for change, the result of which was obliteration of the old start area, the old Sporthotel, and the building of the replacement short circuit which 2020’s Eifel GP contenders judged to be quite good – by the standards to which they have become accustomed.

Therefore, it was pleasing to hear Lewis Hamilton remark after his 91st F1 victory how good it could have been if the race had been run on the Nordschleife. At the new circuit’s opening, Moss and Fangio were among those who had tried the course and the always honest Brit dismissed it as being “not a circuit upon which legends will be written”. At least his successor as a Mercedes-Benz works driver realises what he meant. I’m impressed.