Next year’s European Grand Prix will take place in the Azerbaijan capital on July 17, and will be the calendar’s third pure street circuit alongside Monaco and Singapore.
FIA director Charlie Whiting told the media recently that he had a meeting with the track’s designer Hermann Tilke in Belgium and “apparently it’s all good.”
“It’s not like a normal track being constructed, of course, because it is a proper, pure street circuit. There are a few worrying points they are doing their best to overcome, but it’s going pretty much as planned I would say.”
Whiting will head to Baku in early January in order to gauge the progress and see just how those “worrying points” have been addressed.
“There have been lots of little bits and pieces which require civil works before they start building the track itself. They’ve had to change a lot of pavements, walls, and stuff like that, as they’ve had to move them out of the way to get a better trajectory into a corner and for the run-off areas. But from what I can gather they’re doing a good job.”
Street circuits have their pros and cons just like all regular Grand Prix tracks, but the degree of difficulty is automatically raised when you’re trying to overtake and you don’t have enough room to build up speed or to move alongside your opponent.
Hopefully in this regard, Baku will be a lot more like Singapore than Monaco, where you sometimes win a race during qualifying.
Story references: Autosport
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