By role
October 6 2004

Suzuka is one of the most technical tracks in the world and a driver is required to have full concentration through all the lap. Not only that. Suzuka is one of the few tracks in which a small mistake in one turn can mean a disaster of a time at the end of the lap. Pat Symonds, Executive Director of Engeenering at Renault F1m, explains the difficulties of driving through the esses at Suzuka:

When drivers achieve the standard required in Formula 1, it is remarkable how quickly they can learn a circuit. Provided a circuit is not too technical, one can generally expect to see the cars and drivers close to their ultimate performance in less than ten laps.

Suzuka, though, is different. It is perhaps one of the most challenging of all circuits to learn, and we have seen in the past that relatively inexperienced drivers who have knowledge of the circuit from lower formulae have sometimes made the established stars sit up and take notice: Eddie Irvine’s punchy performance in 1993 springs to mind immediately.

The first sector of Suzuka includes a flowing series of corners – the Esses, from turn three to turn seven – which represent approximately 20% of the lap distance, but 27% of the lap time. Indeed, if the grip of the cars was increased by 5% for the entire lap, 44% of the improvement in lap-time would be generated through this series of corners. It is a critical section of the circuit, and made all the more difficult because a small error early in the sequence of five corners can be compounded throughout the turns that follow to become a large time loss at the end of the sector. For the rest of the lap, Suzuka consists of discrete corners where a mistake only penalises you in one corner. The Esses are a different challenge entirely.

(…) a small error in turn 3 has led to a loss of around 0.25s by the time the car has exited turn 7 (T7). (…) the slower driver does not get on the throttle enough at the corner exit and therefore loses speed (approx 6 kph) and is also undoubtedly off line. This loss of speed means he is slower into T4 (approx. 7 kph) and because he is also off line, he fails to hit the apex. By this stage, the driver has already lost 0.07 seconds relative to the faster lap. He is not positioned correctly for turn 5, but takes an earlier apex which actually allows him to get back on the power sooner – and this means, paradoxically, that by the time the driver reaches the entry to T6, he is travelling quicker (by 4 kph) and gaining time relative to the faster lap.

However, this attempt to recover the time loss actually ends up costing even more time. The driver brakes at the same point for turn 6 (the rate of deceleration is the same on both laps), but the extra speed causes him to miss the apex and results in an apex speed that is 5 kph slower than it should be. This means the driver is off line for turn 7, and as such he has to lift off the throttle much more through this corner, which seriously compounds the time loss: by midway through T7, the time loss has reached 0.226 seconds and the car is travelling 12 kph slower – a speed loss that penalises the driver on the subsequent straight run through the timing beam and towards T8.

In summary, by making a small error at turn 3 – ironically by going into the corner too slowly and not being aggressive enough with the throttle – the driver has lost one hundredth of a second. By attempting to recoup this time loss though turns 5 and 6, the driver actually compounds the mistake and loses just over three tenths of a second by the time he completes the first sector just before T8.

This example of a small error having serious consequences in terms of lap time, encapsulates perfectly the complex challenge of the Suzuka ‘Esses’.