iMatt :: The Blog of Matt Clare

The Southern-Ontario race track Mosport recently transitioned from Don Panoz’s ownership to a new ownership group.

They’ve got some great plans for the place and will hopefully be able to give the place the attention it needs and perhaps do some needed updates.

One update that I feel is needed is more slow corners to promote passing.

The track consist of a lot of long high-speed turns which only really provides for passing with modern high downforce cars like F1 cars and the top classes of ALMS. Road cars and other racing series tend to do almost all of their passing in breaking zones or out of slow corners and are forced to follow each-other through most of Mosport’s corners.

I propose a chicane or “S” in place of what is now turn 8 and some of 9. Turn 8 is at the end of a long straight and is a sweeper with some banking, it doesn’t slow cars that much of the straight and does not provide for the changes in running speed that promote passing. Further, I’ve seen street cars and lower formula cars have moments overcooking it into that corner — thankfully there’s generous run-off.

By adding a chicane or “S” cars will be forced to break down to a slow enough speed to negotiate the turn. The need to get the breaking point right and the opposite direction corner could promote passing through this section and on into the start/finish straight. Further I’d added a “kink” after the new 9 both to respect the current layout of the in-field terrain (as best as I can remember) and keep drivers worrying about their positioning relative to the corner and other drivers.

What’s more is the current turn 8 area has no stands, moving turn 8 forwards and adding more corners would provide an excellent spectator area.

I’m no Hermann Tilke, but that is probably a good thing.

Here are some pictures of turn 8:

You can view the current track in Google Maps – Google Earth – OpenStreetMap

The original source for track map:
Pittenger Will, Mosport International Raceway. (2008, July 20). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 03:13, November 6, 2011, from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mosport.svg

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 6th, 2011 at 14:58 and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.