Drivers call for track changes after limited overtaking blights F1 finale
Formula 1 drivers have called for changes to be made to the Yas Marina circuit layout after a season finale labelled by many as “boring”.
The Abu Dhabi Grand Prix featured little in the way of overtaking, leading some drivers to criticise the current track design.
Mercedes’ Lewis Hamilton said: “They really need to look at changing it [the track]. You do get a bit of a tow down the straights but once you get to the last sector…
“It’s a great, great track, but unfortunately it doesn’t suit the cars very well. In the last sector you just can’t follow [another car].
“It’s one of the worst tracks in the sense that you need to be 1.4-seconds quicker to pass the car in front and we [he and teammate Valtteri Bottas] have the same car and only a few tenths between us, so I was never going to overtake unless he made a big mistake. And even if he did the runoffs here are massive so you can still keep it on. Once you’re within 1.2s the car just stops and you start sliding around.”
Bottas added: “It’s a track where it’s really difficult to follow once you get close [to another car] you feel how much [performance] you lose. It’s not easy to overtake here.”
Ferrari’s Kimi Raikkonen added that current fuel-saving rules didn’t help: “I tried to be on the limit [of fuel] I could use, so it was kind of a boring race. But this is the rules. It’s more like endurance racing. But as racers, nobody’s happy because we want to race.”