The core problems Yas Marina’s long-awaited tweaks won't address

It’s arguably a cliche – but no less true for being repeated – that while you can’t polish a turd you can roll it in glitter. What, then, to make of the news that the unloved Yas Marina circuit is to be given a nip-and-tuck in the hope of generating more overtaking opportunities for F1 cars?

Certainly, this was a case of now or never given the imminent arrival of a new technical formula which will eliminate DRS, the widely derided overtaking gimmick which has acted as Yas Marina’s get-out-of-jail-free card for the past decade. For all the spectacle of the venue itself and the razzmatazz of the day-into-night format, it remains extraordinary that a track with a back straight so long you can’t see the end of it from within the cockpit yields so few ‘genuine’ passes and so little strategic variety.

While the promoters pay a tidy sum for the honour of hosting the climax of the season, even the (vanishingly few) F1 races here which have been title deciders were duds. Surely the only person ever to have been on the edge of their seat during an Abu Dhabi GP was the prominent F1 blogger who accidentally hit ‘publish’ on their pre-written ‘Fernando Alonso wins the F1 world championship’ story during the 2010 Brazilian GP, and whose trigger finger must have been veritably trembling a week later as 'Nando spent umpteen laps fruitlessly staring at the rear wing of Vitaly Petrov’s Renault.

While it’s easy to point the finger at circuit architect Hermann Tilke – and experience seems to demonstrate that the more organic and/or intuitively designed venues on the calendar work better than Tilke’s cut-and-paste ‘greatest hits of other tracks’ approach – he isn’t necessarily to blame. Like anybody else providing a service, Tilke is prisoner to the caprice of that unfathomable beast: the client. Pretty much everything that sucks most obviously about Yas Marina, including several elements being amended in the facelift, carry the whiff of being mandated from above.

 

Photo by: Motorsport Images

For instance, the ‘North Hairpin’ – Turn 7 in engineerspeak – which might have been a great overtaking spot if someone hadn’t decided to plonk a massive, elevated grandstand right on top of where the run-off ought to have been (see above). The late Charlie Whiting, race director and safety delegate at the time, astutely clocked the absurdity of building what was in effect a brick wall at the end of a long straight and insisted on shoehorning in a chicane. In the new layout this compromise will be expunged by bringing the entire corner forwards to include the run-off which should have been there in the first place, and the good folk in the grandstands will just have to swallow being a little bit further away from the action.

The deployment of the overused term "iconic" – to describe something which doesn’t even exist yet – sums up Yas Marina’s abiding problem. It’s always been trying too hard to be something it isn’t

One element not being changed during the facelift, perhaps because to do so would be to acknowledge the hubris behind the original decision, is the location of the pit complex, which is on the wrong side of the circuit. Backing on to the marina, it adequately addressed the business of not expecting the plutocrats in attendance to scuff off too much Gucci shoeleather en route to the hospitality enclosures. But it also necessitated that ridiculous tunnel.

Far from being a distinctive and noteworthy feature, the tunnel connecting the pitlane with the track is an embarrassing carbuncle. Watching a Formula 1 car stutter and harrumph as its driver threads it carefully through this absurd concrete vestibule is the opposite of exciting. It’s like encountering the owner of a bloated SUV nervously negotiating a multi-storey car park having become disoriented on the way to the KFC drive-through window.

Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes F1 W11

Photo by: Charles Coates / Motorsport Images

Tilke excused himself from the wretchedness of the complex of right-angle turns which threads around what was then known as the Yas Viceroy hotel, saying the owners decided late in the day to double the size of the caravansary in question. The makeover will open the radii with the aim of making this section less stop-start – a glitter-rolling exercise if ever there was one...

But Tilke only has himself to blame for the circuit’s other soon-to-be-expunged damp squib, the left-right-left-left at the end of the second straight, whose only calling card was a touch of adverse camber. That slope will soon be steeper and facing in the opposite direction as this whole section is replaced by a single banked curve – one which the acting head of the circuit described in a lavishly produced promo video as “iconic”.

The deployment of that overused term – to describe something which doesn’t even exist yet – sums up Yas Marina’s abiding problem. It’s always been trying too hard to be something it isn’t. If a circuit or feature warrants it, iconic status awaits – but this is not within the gift of an architect or race promoter to bestow.
Especially to something which hasn’t even been built yet.

Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing RB16

Photo by: Glenn Dunbar / Motorsport Images