Geez, whatever happened to Watkins Glen?
One of the most beautiful and challenging road courses on the planet. Long uphills; dump speed through the chicane; through the “boot” downhill tight turns; into a massive uphill onto the stands and pits straight, then with a sharp 90 right; back up the hill!
Today’s F1; basically flat tracks; wide turn dump areas; common chassis and body; few second pit stops; ain’t nothing like the real F1 legends!
aside from a great track, what made it great is sadly why we’ll never get it back
it was a nice getaway/working holiday for the drivers and they loved it and the track, but now, well, there’s no glitter or casinos or places to hobnob with the beautiful people and be seen out and about even if we did have the extortion money F1 wants let alone improvements to the track and pits
but it was a hell of a lot of fun while it lasted
Geez, whatever happened to Watkins Glen? One of the most beautiful and challenging road courses on the planet.And surely one of the prettiest state parks in the country.
Check out the trail on the left. You can walk along that "gorgeous" creek for quite awhile on it.
(Watkins Glen is classified as a "gorge")
Map showing "Gorge Trail"...
"Geez, whatever happened to Watkins Glen?..."
The same thing that happened to the rest of F1: the Chrome Gnome. Very few venues can afford to permanently host an F1 race because of the exorbitant "race hosting fee," plus the fact that F1's race hosting contract stipulates that the circuit owner will make whatever "upgrades" to the track and facilities the Formula One Group (meaning Bernie) deems necessary. Which all too often has run to several tens of millions of dollars. The principals at too many venues just don't want to get into bed with a snake like Ecclestone.
Take the Indian Grand Prix and the Buddh circuit for example. Bernie was never stupid enough to think the Indians could make a long-term go of an F1 circuit (in that location) because:
1) It was built in one of the poorest states in a country where more than 300 million people (about 1/4th of the total population) live on less than $1 a day
2) Widespread poverty means that not only are qualified ticket-buyers in short supply, so is luxury in general. High rollers are not known to be fond of having to fly 12 hours to stay somewhere where many streets are filled with the scent of urine, and where no westerner can go for a walk in public without attracting a crush of beggars and aggressive shopkeepers. Which means Delhi, the only major city close to Buddh, is the anti-Monte Carlo.
3) India is a country the size of France but that only had (before Buddh was built) four paved surface auto racing circuits, and three of them were converted from air bases they inherited from the fleeing Brits. Which tells you they have next to no "grass roots" auto racing culture. Every state in the American southeast and midwest has at least 10-times that many amateur-level paved race tracks, drag strips and roundy-round combined.
Q: So why did Bernie sign them up?
A: Because they had investors with money burning holes in their pockets.
A man with Bernie's business savvy knew full well this was a short-term business arrangement, and that he should get while the gettin' was good.
The best description of the malfeasance of Bernie (in the name of the Formula One Group) I've come across was in
an article written by Dieter Rencken for Autosport magazine in 2013. Unfortunately, the full article is behind a pay wall but there is a synopsis that does it justice
posted at the Clip the Apex forum.
For years it's been clear that it would be a struggle for F1 to outlive Bernie. But the sport has been trading on past glories for years now and even though Ecclestone is (ostensibly) gone, I'm not sure the sport isn't already sick unto death.
But in any case, good luck to the new owners. They're going to need it.