The Circuit of The Americas is to undergo its second major resurfacing early next year as it again tries to eradicate the bumps that have made it “better suited to a rally car”, according to three-time F1 champion Max Verstappen.
…built on marshland…
Well there’s your problem.
Depending on how much they put into the underlayment it might never be flat.
This area of Texas has infamously expansive clay soils, such that buildings require specialized foundation systems designed to decouple the building from the surface layer of soil entirely and provide several inches of headroom for the clays to swell in wet weather without creating uplift pressure on the foundation. Without that, the soil will push structures upward when wet, and then leave them unsupported after drying. This leads to uneven subsidence and progressive structural failure.
When COTA was originally built, a massive subsurface drainage system was installed to mitigate this issue, but according to some even that was cut down significantly from the civil engineers’ original recommendations for cost, and then when the circuit was flooded in 2015, the system was damaged and stopped being able to keep up with soil moisture levels. That’s when the bumps started happening, and unfortunately they’re not likely to stop without massive underground work to fully repair the drainage system. COTA is going to require expensive resurfacing every few years until that happens, or the track’s financial supporters decide it’s not worth the cost to maintain anymore. Without it, it will quickly become undriveable for most race cars.
So what I am hearing is that it is the future home of US rally cross.
If it turns the post-race and/or parc fermé into less of a clusterfuck, hey, I’m all in on that.
So everyone’s in agreement the track is a problem, but the DQs still stand? Make it make sense F1…
Car was not within the rules, car gets DQd. Makes a lot of sense in my opinion.
Every track has its quirks, the teams are instructed to figure out to make the fastest car WITHIN the rules. It’s not like they didn’t know it was bumpy, they figured that out first lap in FP1, every other team did as well. Most of the teams raised height to make sure they complied with rules, Merc and Ferrari either didn’t or didn’t enough
It was the same track for everyone, they had a (single) practice session to identify issues and set ride height accordingly ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
