The TROUBLED History of Spa Francorchamps 

spa, brazil, suzuka, sepang, and istanbul park

Monza :)

In spa's case, a killing machine?

tbh, not all racetracks have the luxury of spa's scenery.

Silverstone is a good track as well.

He admitted he hated that track because of the safety, yet it was probably his best track!

Not only one hand he was a right hand guy and he was using his LEFT

Jim Clark is by far the greatest motorsport driver of all time, and one of the best f1 drivers ever

@@chuala428 normal for left hand drive car drivers, at least. i'm a rightie but left hand does most of the driving and drifting while shifting no problemo for LHD drifters.

@@Skive_67 most definately... testicles of unobtanium

F1 today; Just added weight!

THANK YOU!! I knew somebody would have answered this question that's why I came to the comments.

Thank you

For anyone who doesn't understand British: A spanner is a wrench. 😉😋

thanks, that was not clear

What scott doesn't mention (for obvious reasons) is that Chris Bairstow was decapitated during that crash so it was a headless body they were driving around!

A _decapitated_ body no less.

@@nathanm5594 That is sub-human behaviour. Thankfully we live in better times

Or the crash at Zandvort (I think) when the magnesium Honda crashed, caught fire, and the driver (sorry, I do not remember his name) was caught in the car, and the race continued while the car had to burn itself out with a man inside of it.

Why didn't they stop the race??? Like wtf???

The runoff area and barriers need to be changed to make it safer.

And now this has 666k views

As long as they allow the race to take place en heavy rain, barriers and changes to the track will not help. It was complete madness to see the accident with the young driver, Hoff.

@@nomimalone7520 they already did this, but theres a river and hill right after raidillon, so the barriers are already on the limit

Honestly, the problem is this is a flat out blind set of turns into one of the fastest straights in motorsports. The only way the deaths are going to stop is slowing down the cars before they get into Eau Rouge and Raidillon, unless Eau Rouge and Raidillon are fundamentally changed in a way that reduces top speed enough that drivers don't risk getting hit at 140mph by a car that doesn't see them over the crest of a hill.

Bring Back Masta Kink! BBMK! BBMK!

That was actually the last time a fully manual car ever won an F1 GP!

@@hmdwgf Now that detail I didn’t know. Thank you, I love insignificant little details like this.

@@hmdwgf Great detail. Didn't know that.

@@hmdwgf TRUE!

I heard an agreement for putting the walls right next to the track, as this reduces the chance of cars spinning. Making any secondary impact more likely to be front to back instead of front to side, where the driver has much less protection.

@@kevinwilliams3694 i doubt that now since theyve only just changed eau rouge but a safer barrier around the whole section would have been safer and made it more scary as the walls are even closer

On the old layout, Masta, Burnenville and Malmedy were more likely to kill drivers than Eau Rouge-Radillon. What happened was that those sections were eliminated in the rerouting of the track, which left Eau Rouge as one of the few remaining turns that retain the very high speed nature of the old layout. In 1970, Chris Amon told Rob Walker he was taking the Masta Kink on the rev limiter in top gear in his March. Walker worked out that this meant Amon was taking the kink at something like 315 KPH. And the sports cars of that time were even faster because they had more power and lower drag.

There is no real solution that makes everyone happy. You can't move the barrier further back, if you replace the run-off with a gravel trap, than motorbikes can no longer race there. The problem isn't the circuit, it's that whenever you make it safer, drivers and teams will find ways to push it more to the limit again. And at the end of the day, that's why fans come to the race, to see them push, to take that risk and either be rewarded or take the fall when things go wrong.

@@Hans-gb4mv Well I thought it didn't matter what the fans thought safety is number one

This channel exists only to appease the F1 snobs and glamourise it further.

@@Alan-ww8vi what a statement

Gravel seem the only logical solution to stop cars coming back onto the track at Radilion.

I understand thatconcrete makes it far easier to mantain the track since the water does not get so close to the actual road, and of course every mistake doesnt mean hundreds of thousands of € down the drain, but there could easily be a 1-2 metre strip of grass or some plastic no-grip material just beyond the kerbs to punish mistakes. Of course wherever the runoff allows for the car to spin.

@@Arnechk The issue of radillion is the cars are travelling at very high speed, grass or any other low traction material is not going to stop the issue of cars bouncing back onto the circuit. What is more important $ or lives?

@@ashberto6041 Radillion is a corner case, no pun intended. The runoff would have to be extremely long and wide.

Yes absolutely!

Silverstone or Circuit de la Sarthe woild be great

However, the Busstop was called this way as the circuit tricked the government into financing the corner by saying they would upgrade the public transport by adding a busstop.

That’s raidillon actually

Heard there was a tall dead snag you were supposed to aim for to enter the carousel, is it still there?

Bathurst should've been called batshit with how crazy it is. I haven't been there personally, but I've done the track on a driving simulator and didn't get far :D

@@TheChill001 having been there. Think how nuts it seems in Sim and double it. It feels steeper, it feels narrower. The hard thing to understand. When you see it in real life. The parts that feel flat are actually rather steep still.

Was going to comment that Bathurst is up there with Spa with the most dangerous.

It hasn't had its teeth pulled by Safety Sally's. Yet.

@@MurphysLawNZ it's a scary track even on VR haha

I miss this. Im not a huge F1 fan but I was a huge casual American fan in the 90s. Schumacher vs Hill drew me in. I was 10 years old and wake up to watch the grand prix at 5am. I miss those days. My brother and woke up for F1 then NASCAR, then Indycar. When we watched Greg Moore die live, his favorite driver, he never watched open wheel again. A few years more of NASCAR, but his love dwindled for motorsports. It honestly made me sad because that was our Sunday thing.

Yes that was a million times better than the slow crappy uphill chicane they have in recent years. And to think that call that chicane which is only a R,L the bus stop. All over the world whenever a complex is called "bus stop" it is from 2 chicanes that go in opposite directions joined by a small straight. Look at the back straight of Watkins Glen or the Daytona Roval. It gets it's name from the fact that a bus pulls over to the side of the road and then back out again. Having a single R,L chicane is only half of what a bus stop is. Besides that old bus stop as it was in the late 80's had the cars slowing down and a passing opportunity going into it but with the second half of it being more open it allowed drivers to slipstream up the hill onto the main straight to have a chance at passing on the line. I understand the need to slow the cars down in the wake of Imola 1994 but if you look at that track in particular. Yes they added chicanes where Ayrton Senna and also Roland Ratzenberger died that weekend but they removed the chicane (R,L,R) at the bottom of Acqua Minerale and made it into a double apex right hander. and also the tight chicane of Variante Basso is removed for F1 even though it is added for other racing series. Between Rivazza and Variante Basso there also a quick right, left combo that has been changed to a single right hander. So they added chicanes to the fastest part of the track but where they had actual chicanes to slow the cars down they have straightened the corners out and removed the chicanes. Not only that but the two chicanes they introduced are not that tight compared to other circuits. Shows that making changes to circuits isn't always for the best.

Thank you! Hm, surprisingly sloppy for a "history" video!

The biggest mistake/laugh i got was the pronunciation of Le Mans at the start. Wtf.

Too bad I wasted 6 minutes before I found this post. This might have been an interesting watch if it was at least partly accurate…

Yikes, the channel should really correct these mistakes as these seem lazy and egregious. Terrible video.

Dilano died because the race organizers made the decision to have a final lap shootout in terrible conditions. It would have been likely at pretty much any track, as he crashed on the straight and was pretty much invisible in the mist.

​​@@salkdhfpoahergpoahre1534 whether it's raining or not if someone crashes you can't see anything. This was the case for Anthoine Hubert.

@@Missile_Guidance_System482 That's not true at all. There are plenty of crashes where other drivers have time and visibility to react and maneuver through. The big issue with Spa pre-2022 renovations was that, if you went off to the left at eau rouge, you'd fire back towards the track, so everyone had to take evasive action which made the runoff on the right the new line. Hubert got hit because Correa had no where else to go after Hubert hit the tires, but that situation is far less likely to occur now that the run off on the left is so much wider and the barriers have better angles.

@@salkdhfpoahergpoahre1534 For Anthoine Hubert there was a lot of smoke in the area after the many cars had contact, spun out, etc. This was what caused the collision that took Hubert's life, low visibility. Also at that part of the track you are going uphill, making you not be able to see if you are approaching debris or not. Those two combined with high speed can easily cause a casualty if a car is at the wrong place and at the wrong time. What you said also makes sense but you also have to think of the driver's point of view. And about bouncing back onto the track, this is also something completely avoidable whether they change the layout of the track, or remove it from the sport entirely.

Ay I do radicals too in the us I’d love to drive on some of the eu tracks someday

This was my thought as well. The bus stop chicane at Spa was the original “bus stop” chicane because it was literally a bus stop. It worked well enough that many other tracks copied the design (Daytona, Watkins Glen, the Charlotte Roval, to name a few)

In rallying we have some chicanes that are called bus stop chicanes as they look similar

It's not just the safety aspect. They also use tarmac because of track days and it's easier to maintain.

Looks like the track is a little cambered right at the apex as well, which would make things even more difficult. It's easy to see why the cars would get unsettled. If the track were level, the drivers probably wouldn't even think of it as a corner. But the fact that the track dips right at the apex makes it far more difficult to navigate flat out.

@@ccramit this, the devil is in the details.

Absolutely can’t understand why they are all so hopeless at being what they were designed for and having racing happen on the track hence racetrack.

@@eoghannmcalpine8188 This makes very little sense.

@@Yvolve I’m saying that they are all just tracks and not RACEtracks as they see very little racing happening on them

@@eoghannmcalpine8188 Not true obviously, but your other comment makes more sense now.

that depends on how you do it. These safety meassures also seep into the design of newer circuits and it is unanimously agreed that any track layed down after the 70's is slower and much less contestible than the older tracks, leading to a decline in the sports popularity as more races end up with little change from start to finish, less thrilling duels, etc. Safety is important, but it should not remove the idea of competition from a sport

I bet older viewers had flashbacks to this moment when Norris crashed in 2021 qualifying

According to wikipedia, he was released from hospital in december 2021 to continue rehabilitation at home

Zanardi's life story is crazy. Is he the most unlucky man in the world because of all those horrible incidents, or is he the most lucky man in the world because he survived all those horrible incidents?

. . And on the extreme other end of the spectrum, Greg Moore ( against whom Alex Zanardi raced, . . both drivers being monumentally talented ) was lost pretty much immediately. Contrasting fates, but both hugely devastating 😢🙏.