[Atticus]

In the light of the sad events, of course, and the horrendous fact that, after 21 years, a driver actually lost his life due to injuries suffered during a Grand Prix.

I personally still think we should let the tracks alone as far as layouts go – I’m for every other safety improvement, safety barriers, catch fence, abrasive run-offs, HANS, you name it.

I may be in the minority, but I think drivers are fully aware of the fact that they may suffer enormous crashes in near-flat out 250-300kph corners such as Eau Rouge, 130R or indeed the Dunlop curve. Paraphrasing Niki Lauda from the movie ‘Rush’ they accept their chances when they get into the cockpits. I just feel like even Jules Bianchi would not regret that he had to race on that particular piece of tarmac – in fact, drivers often call that sequence from Turn 2 to Dunlop their favourite on the whole calendar, a testament to their respect for it.

Bottom line is, it’s the drivers putting their lives on the line during the GPs and I think they should be heavily involved in any kind of decisions of these kind. And my hunch is that they wouldn’t change it and I would kind of be with them on that one.

(Not that it has been considered, modifying Suzuka at Dunlop, I’m just curious of your views. It’s all purely academic.)

[Anonymous]

I don’t think the Suzuka circuit layout needs to be changed because of the crash suffered by Bianchi. The problem was that he hit a recovery vehicle, this has nothing to do with the circuit layout. Just slow the cars down when you have to put these kind of recovery vehicles into the bounds of the track to prevent this type of crash again, a virtual safety car or full safety car should be more than sufficient for this in the future.

[Craig Woollard]

No changes to that sequence of corners itself should be required in terms of the racing line etc. It should be remembered that the escape roads (there are two at Dunlop) are used in the two East and West layouts of Suzuka, so removing them as escape roads is really a no-go.

I personally do not feel that other than perhaps improving drainage as the cars dip down before Dunlop, any major changes need to be made. Suzuka has had very few changes to the layout since it was built after all, despite multiple nasty crashes in the past.

[Author]

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