MONTREAL — Notoriously hard on cars, the Circuit Gilles-Villeneuve in Montreal poses some specific challenges to Formula One teams as they look for speed on the 12-turn, 4.361-kilometre track at Īle Notre-Dame.
Whether it's the difficult track surfaces, high speeds, punishment on brakes or the ever-present walls, Montreal puts F1 teams to the test — and has become infamous for giving drivers fits.
Used only once a year as a racecourse, the drivers always find the track slippery for the first few sessions until there's a good coating of rubber on the surface, which increases grip.
"There is always a lot of graining at this track and because it is only used one a year, it is very dirty when we first start running," McLaren-Mercedes driver Lewis Hamilton said. "That soon clears up on the racing line, but this dirt and the marbles from the graining make it very slippery off-line."
Getting onto the marbles — tiny balls of rubber shed by the soft racing tires — most often ends with a car slamming into one of the many walls that line the circuit.
While Montreal is a high-speed circuit similar to the famed Monza home of the Italian Grand Prix, the Canadian race poses the challenge of several heavy braking points between its long straights.
But because Monza has the highest average speed of all F1 tracks, keeping the brakes cool there is not a problem. But when hard braking is combined with a slower average speed, teams need to use larger brake air ducts to keep the carbon-fibre discs from overheating.
"For brakes, [Montreal] is simply the most demanding circuit on the calendar in terms of cooling and wear. The braking energy is high, but not as high as Monza, yet brake cooling is more of an issue," Toyota chassis manager Pascal Vasselon said.
"You have high top speed and heavy braking but so many slow corners that, in the end, the average speed stays in the mid-range compared to other tracks."
The teams will use a medium down-force aerodynamic package in Montreal that ensures drivers have enough speed on the straights to stay ahead of rivals and sufficient grip for the slower corners, but finding the right balance is tricky at best.
In Montreal, many of the teams remove the car's small add-on wings used at other tracks as a way to reduce drag. That helps the cars hit 320 kilometres an hour at the end of the casino straight before the 130 km/h chicane that exits onto the start-finish line.
"The last chicane is quite difficult, especially in qualifying when you have to pull out the maximum, so it is very easy to go wrong over the curbs and then lose traction," BMW Sauber driver Robert Kubica said. "There you can win or lose."
In addition, a resurfacing of the track prior to the 2005 season caused more problems than it solved, as the new pavement hasn't stood up well to the massive forces produced by F1 cars.
When an F1 car slows to 60 km/h from about 300 km/h for the hairpin turn, the cars exert a sheering force of about 600 kilograms through each of the four tiny strips of rubber making contact with the pavement. That has resulted in bits of asphalt being pulled up, which creates an added hazard for the drivers.
"There are stones on the driving line, so when you end up on that you can almost turn the car," Kimi Raikkonen of Ferrari said. "For sure if that happens again, it is going to be very difficult on those areas and, of course, the curbs are not easy. When you hit them wrong you can easily end up in the wall."
And while Montreal is often particularly tough on rookies, sometimes it's not the track that makes them nervous.
Sebastian Vettel of Toro Rosso has not raced in Montreal, but found a source of concern in the rickety pontoon path the drivers must use to cross the Olympic basin that runs next to the paddock.
"I have never been here, but the bridge coming into the paddock looked quite scary," he said. "But for the circuit, I don't know yet."
