I remember a quote from Jean Alesi that was reported on Autosprint a few years ago in an article about the most challenging corners.
Many drivers elected Eau Rouge at Spa but Alesi said that it is in his opinion the most overrated corner of the calendar because it’s actually not as challenging as people like to make it to be. In fact, he explained, due to the sudden change of slope, in the moment you have to make the change of direction and pick the line for the uphill part you get a lot of grip from inertial forces, and the car is glued to the track.
AeroGT3 wrote:
The corkscrew at Laguna Seca, in California. I've driven it, and it's a bitch for sure
That introduces IMO a very important distinction : difficult vs spectacular.
Not always, but quite often it happens that what looks like tremendously difficult is actually not much a challenge and just spectacular, while what looks ordinary can be awfully difficult.
Once in a Italian tv program about motorsport there were different people, drivers included, discussing, as often happened in the last years, the argument of spectacle and they talked about difficulty of tracks.
One of the drivers was Dindo Capello and he used exactly the corkscrew as example.
He said that the first time he went to Laguna Seca he didn’t know the track but obviously had heard many people talking about the corkscrew and was looking forward to the challenge it was. But then, after just few laps, he discovered that the corkscrew is actually a pretty easy corner; easy in the sense that the difference between doing it right and doing it quite bad (for a professional driver which obviously doesn’t correspond to the quite bad of a “normal” casual driver), doesn’t have a big impact in the laptime, 1 tenth at max, and if you don’t have other cars around you so you can focus on the corner, it’s pretty simple to make it right.
On the contrary he said that there are a couple of fast corners that apparently are nothing special and certainly not spectacular as the corkscrew, but are actually lot more challenging because even when you know them well it’s simple to make a little mistake in the line, absolutely invisible from outside/tv and just barely perceptible from the car, and that little mistake can easily cost 3-4 tenths, almost without noticing it.
The first chicane at Monza. Turn 8 at Turkey.
This is the corner, it is completely blind and competitors must brake from around 90mph before little crest to take the off-camber corner at less than 50mph. I'm sitting on the inside here and this guy took it perfectly.
This next guy game in a little too hot and followed the wheel tracks of a previouse car who had just managed to save it. The extra speed however sent him straddling the ditch for several meters before pulling it back onto the road and ripping the wheel up with him.
This was a huge accident, the driver didn't see behind the crest here and came flying into the corner at about 60mph. He stood no chance of making it round and fired straight over the ditch and into a bank on the other side. His co-driver was fine but he had a possible broken arm, anyway I think he'll remember that corner for a long time to come.
