F1 | Russell: “We may have some track limit issues at Portimao"
This upcoming week will mark the comeback of the Portuguese GP, held at the Algarve International Track in Portimao. George Russell believes this might mean some issues with track limit for the drivers.
The Portuguese GP was held at the famous Estoril circuit between 1984 till 1996. For the 2020 season, which scheduling was heavily impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, the GP came back and will be hosted at the Algarve International Circuit for the first time. The track located in Portimao, Portugal hosted before events such as 1000km of Algarve and a GP2 round in 2009. It was also announced that beside the F1 round in the 2020 calendar, the track will also host a round of MotoGP later in November 2020.
Although some of the drivers have never driven on the track, there are some of them who did had previous experiences there. For example, George Russell of Williams drove there in a round of F3 in 2015. He and Nicolas Latifi also tested an older Mercedes car there in 2017.
The young Brit spoke about his concerns regarding track limits at Portimao, something he remembered from his run in F3. As he said: "I'm really excited. It’s a spectacular circuit, very undulating, a lot of blind corners, which is great, and adds a lot of character. Obviously I need to wait and see once I've driven it in a current car, and how it will all pan out. We may have some track limit issues, which I hope can be rectified before we even get there, at Turn One.”
He added: "I know that was an issue in F3. We had a race weekend in F3 in 2015, and on the Thursday we had a test day, which was on the quick Turn One, which is what we'll be doing for the F1 weekend. But everybody was just doing track limits, so they actually adopted doing a sort of a hairpin loop, which was very nice. So I'm actually surprised we haven't done that loop, because for racing it would be better having a slower speed corner at the end of a long straight.”
“But nevertheless, I'm excited to go there and intrigued for the challenge that we face and the teams face.”
Regarding the track limits, Michael Masi, the FIA race director said he is expecting abuse of track limits to be an issue, but not only when it comes to the first corner of the track layout.
As he said: "Regarding track limits, Turn One won't be the only location that we've got a possibility there. However, we've put some elements in place to try and manage those as best we can for the event.”
It's been a long time since we raced in Portugal!
— Formula 1 (@F1) October 19, 2020
And some of the memories are flipping crazy... 👀#PortugueseGP 🇵🇹 #F1
