Macau
While Sophia Floersch’s accident in Macau stole the headlines, there was plenty of other racing that topped the bill in the former Portuguese province of China. Most entertaining were the bikes, and few who have ever seen the likes of Michael Rutter at full tilt on a street circuit will quite understand what full commitment looks like, but there was also the local Food4U sponsored touring car race that was both exciting, and frightening looking at the safety cells. And that’s before we get to the aero on each of these cars.
The GT race was, unlike last year, surprisingly well behaved. Saturday’s race saw the Mercedes finish second and third behind Augusto Farfus’s BMW, Mercedes’ Maro Engel claiming that the main race was Sunday so there was no point in smashing up his car in the warm up event. Sunday passed similarly without incident, but there was an issue and that was the number of cars on the grid; just 15 started, and they were dominated by Mercedes, Audi, BMW and Porsche.
Nissan was represented by three cars, but they were off the pace, mostly due to a set up issue that left them with chronic understeer, but also they were chasing performance to compete with the experienced runners. Stephane Ratel, the man who liaises between the Macau GP organisers and the FIA, made the point; Lamborghini, Honda and McLaren have all come to take part in the World Cup, and none were here in 2018, potentially costing him six entries. Bentley said that it was the right event, wrong circuit, so were also not there.
After the 2017 crash fest, the cars were almost impossible to insure, and there were no privateers. The FIA has the event for Platinum drivers only anyway, and I can see their point. There were 15 high quality drivers, and cars, and any more than 20 you are looking for trouble on a street course. However, the race does need some local flavour and that can only come by opening it up to Silver drivers and independent entries.
Ratel believes that the new manufacturers need to believe that they stand a chance against those who have collected such data on the track that they are now pretty much invincible. And there is a lot to learn for a new manufacturer. The new Pirelli D2 tyre was used for the first time in Macau, a tyre that was designed for Audi and Lamborghini that ran with high camber settings and low pressure, putting undue stress on the inner sidewall. It fixed the problem, but the unintended consequence was that it also got rid of the inherent understeer in the Mercedes, making it even quicker.
At Macau, a low-grip circuit on which there are no long radius high speed corners, generating heat in the front tyre is a bit of a nightmare. The Nissans ran 10degC outside the operating window, while Audi also struggled to generate the heat in their rubber. BMW, by contrast, was cooking its rears so it was with some trepidation that, with higher temperatures on Sunday, they went racing.
It meant that Augusto Farfus spent the half of the lap in which it is impossible to overtake going as slowly as possible to preserve his tyres, and then floored it for the straights, going on to take victory. While the FIA can look at the qualifying times and say that they got it all right, with some justification as the times were close, Farfus had an inherent advantage on the long straights from the start of the weekend. That meant that Raffaele Marciello, who started on pole position for Saturday’s race in his Mercedes (after somehow making up eight tenths of a second on the opposition in three straights and two corners from the Melco Hairpin on his qualifying run), got a good start, was flat out through turn 1, and was in second place by Mandarin corner. The Italian was confused.
Whatever, with 15 cars and fewer crashes the GT race was less eventful than in 2017, but in 2019 it seems unlikely that the cars will be able to be insured either, so we are likely to see a similar grid if the FIA votes to keep its World Cup at the track again. The event has been labelled, and Floersch’s accident won’t have helped change the perception of the track, even though these very F3 cars have raced there since 2012.
What is the future of the Macau Grand Prix? Many who were there believe that the FIA don’t want to host their World Cups there anymore, and to an extent I can understand why; with Daniel Hegarty losing his life last year on the bike, with the GT crash last year, and with Floersch this year, the event seems incompatible with their Road Safety position. I only hope that, if they do leave it, they will just go, and leave the circuit intact. It is a casino on tarmac, and it is an antidote to the remote European GP tracks on which anything other than F1 looks slow and awful.
While we should take the safety levels to the highest levels, we should also take time and effort to protect the ethos of each individual race track. Rather than dull it with changes that I fear are inevitable, I would prefer that the slower cars, Formula 4 or GT4 be used instead. It goes against the grain, but I think with the eyes of the world on the event after two high profile injuries, change is inevitable.
