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IndyCar to race in China (59 posts)

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AMG Fan said 1 year, 5 months ago:

As soon as the dismal attendance for this year’s race was apparent and no race promoter or sponsor wanted to pay the sanctioning fee.

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Keith Collantine said 1 year, 2 months ago:

This image of the track layout from the IndyCar media guide is the first I’ve seen of it:

It’s 6.23km (3.2 miles) which makes it longer than most F1 circuits, so those straights could be pretty quick. They’re either going to need a lot of run-off or Baltimore-style temporary chicanes.

It doesn’t seem to say if it’s clockwise or anti-clockwise, or what direction it runs in.

Perhaps someone can match that up to a satellite map of Qingdao?

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Stephen Jones said 1 year, 2 months ago:

that hairpin..

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SouthAussie94 said 1 year, 2 months ago:

The whole hairpin section seems totally unnecessary..
Apart from that it doesn’t seem too bad. Not great but not terrible.

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Fer no.65 said 1 year, 2 months ago:

That’s… not… pretty… The whole harpin section, as @MPJ1994 says, could well be scrapped. Dunno where’s placed in China, but I wonder why they didn’t just make a 90º turn there, instead of going all the way to the harpin and back.

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ajokay said 1 year, 2 months ago:

Found it! It’s contained within a city block around the Qingdao Zhongneng FC stadum.

http://g.co/maps/km6up

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Keith Collantine said 1 year, 2 months ago:

Nice work @ajokay!

So I make it that the longest straight is pushing 1km long. Surely the track is going to run clockwise, then, allowing them to use the opposite side of that crossroads as the run-off?

That said, Google maps aren’t always bang up-to-date so there could be more roads at the opposite end of the long straight now which they could also use.

At one point they’re clearly doubling-back on themselves and going back up the other side of one road. It seems unnecessary – the track is already on the long side.

The main roads are nice and wide, four lanes of traffic. Given the width of the straights, they might even be able to set up their pit boxes on one half and have the other half as the race track, again on that northernmost straight.

However have a look at where the interior road around the circuit meets the exterior road, on the south side of the track. The media centre diagram shows this as a 90-degree right-hander but the road configuration there looks more complicate – a fiddly and narrow right-left-right.

Having had a look at this I’m more positive about the circuit on the whole. It looks reasonably quick for a street track and overtaking should be possible – though of course we don’t know if they’ll have to tweak the configuration and insert chicanes as they did with Baltimore.

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ajokay said 1 year, 2 months ago:

Whilst I think the section of the track that uses both sides of the dual carriageway is a little unnecessary, the circuit configuration otherwise looks pretty good. It’s not all right angles, and the broad hairpin to the north of the stadium should be interesting with the obvious change in surface. the turn back onto the main road south of the stadium is, as you say @keithcollantine not the same on the map as it is on the aerial imagery, but I think what is there could mix things up a bit, narrowing down and flicking left and right.

Theres also a lot of interesting architecture. The stadium is the obvious one, but then theres the swimming centure which looks like a giant sea shell (a certain oil company could paint it red and yellow for a brilliant advertising opportunity). There’s the interestingly-shaped, what maps labels as the “Etsong VIP Chamber Yisi Kai’en flagship store” – whatever that is – in the middle of the circuit, the Y-shaped skyscraper on the inside of the turn at the east of the circuit, and the stately geodesic dome (took me a while to figrue out what it was) of the Qingdao Indoor Sports Arena!

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TommyB said 1 year, 2 months ago:

A1 Grand Prix in Beijing? Wasn’t that the circuit where they turned up to and the cars couldn’t even get round the hairpin?

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Keith Collantine said 1 year, 2 months ago:

@tommyb89 Yup!

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Polishboy808 said 1 year, 2 months ago:

Can someone please map this thing out on Gmap-Pedometer? I have no idea where this thing is going, none of the roads (except for the ones around the stadium) look like the ones on the map….

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sam3110 said 1 year, 2 months ago:

http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=5361321

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Keith Collantine said 1 year, 2 months ago:

@polishboy808 Here you go:

http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=5361339

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Keith Collantine said 1 year, 2 months ago:

D’oh!

I think mine is more accurate than @sam3110‘s though :-p

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Polishboy808 said 1 year, 2 months ago:

Oh wow, I’m blind :S Thanks that actually doesn’t look that bad. I hope this race will be as good as Baltimore, but without the problems that it has this year.

Whatever, no matter how bad it is, it can’t get any worse than St. Pete Haha….

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