Shanghai International Circuit is Next

Brawn officials must be sitting somewhere and cracking a few bottles to celebrate pulling a rabbit out of the proverbial hat as their disputed diffuser has been declared legal by FIA’s International Court of Appeal on Wednesday. This doesn’t mean that we should hand Jenson Button and Brawn the trophy and tell the other teams and drivers to stay home, that they shouldn’t bother coming to Shanghai this weekend. In fact, despite this bit of good news for Brawn, Williams and Toyota, expect Jenson Button to have to battle to win his hat-trick at the Shanghai International Circuit.

Shanghai is next on the Formula One schedule

The other teams will certainly be disappointed with the news, but will soon recover and implement diffusers of their own using the disputed designs. This will take time, how much, and will they implement them before Shanghai, only they know, but the likely seems remote that they could install them and test them before Shanghai.

The Shanghai International Circuit is a technical course that the drivers generally enjoy, with a variety of slow and fast sections requiring proper speed management and opportunities to pass at several points. The total length of the track is a moderate 5.451 kilometers, and it has the general shape of the Chinese character “Shang”, which translates as high or above in the English language. The set up of the cars will be critical as they need speed and balance through the high-speed corners and but good mechanical grip for the hairpin corners. The course designers created a beautiful course with seven right and seven left turns, with several opportunities for the drivers to pass slower traffic. One of these passing areas is Turn One and another is the tight corner at the end of the 1.1 km straight stretch that demands the cars brake from speeds in access of 320 km/hr on the area of the track between Turn 13 and Turn 14.

Watch carefully this weekend when your watching for these areas of the track, they will be where all the excitement will probably occur, and enjoy the race.

Image: Newscom