2012 Grand Prix of Mexico

[Andy77]

btw, does the horquilla hairpin still exist or is it gone for good ?

[Tourer]

Originally Posted by phoenix

As far as I am aware Charlie Whiting is ONLY connected with F1 - does he have an official track inspection FIA role? (He is F1 Race Director, although also a Safety Delegate I believe). Or only a FOM employee role? (I may be wrong, but as an ex-employee of Brabham and an old mate of Bernie, I guess FOM pay his salary - not the FIA)

I would surmise that if Mexico was not looking seriously at an F1 race bid, Charlie would not have been there..........

Charlie does a lot more than F1 in regard to track inspections - for example he has done the inspections down here for Bathurst, Gold Coast and Eastern Creek for their FIA licences and he is on the FIA circuit commission.

No idea who pays him (none of my business in any case) but he certainly represents the FIA in most cases that I have seen.

[wnut]

Originally Posted by Tourer

Charlie does a lot more than F1 in regard to track inspections - for example he has done the inspections down here for Bathurst, Gold Coast and Eastern Creek for their FIA licences and he is on the FIA circuit commission.

No idea who pays him (none of my business in any case) but he certainly represents the FIA in most cases that I have seen.

The association requesting the FIA licence would surely be fitting this bill.
Would they not?

[Purist]

Andy, I think the original Horquilla is under a grandstand, as is part of the old Espiral. However, the somewhat shortened version was still there, near as I could tell, as recently as 2008.

If they want a roughly 3-mile track, they will just about have to resurrect the entire thing. If you run the track more or less as it was in 1986-92, that's 2.747 miles. The baseball stadium bypass of the first half of Peraltada brings that up to 2.786 miles. The original course, with the full-length Horquilla and Espiral, was 3.107 miles (5.0km on the nose).

As for bumps, I never noticed anything all that bad in the coverage for ChampCar, A1GP, NASCAR Busch Series, or Grand-Am. if these guys wanted to see REAL bumps, they should have visited Lime Rock Park before it was repaved.

[Matt]

Mexican round of the WEC would be awesome.

[daallo]

Originally Posted by Andy77

btw, does the horquilla hairpin still exist or is it gone for good ?

It's gone.

And well, it has always been considered very bumpy and the whole city is, if you consider that it was build over a lake, lierally. However with good repaving that problem can be solved, at least in a short term.

And yeah, a WEC Round would be awesome. The track has already hosted IMSA (1000 kilometers), USRRC (1000 km), Grand-Am (250), and World Sportscar Championship (1000 km). Actually, something curious is that exactly in those 3 races have been the only ones where Mexicans have won in a major (that means excluding Atlantic for example) series in México:

1968 USRRC: Moisés Solana
1974 IMSA: Rebaque-Van Beuren-Rojas
2006 Grand-Am: Luis D�*az.

So yeah, it would be great. Back in 2002 it was announced that ALMS would hold a 6 hour race in 2003 which never happened and a couple of years ago Grand-Am announced that they'd revive the 1000 kilometers of México...They didn't come back .

[Purist]

Swine Flu, I think it was, was the stated cause for a number of the international series pulling back from Mexico a couple of years ago.

[daallo]

It was A1 GP...And coincidentally months before that, NASCAR Nationwide, Grand-Am and Champ Car (for obvious reasons) announced they wouldn't come to México but for other reasons...

[duke_toaster]

We have all heard the stories about the security situation in Mexico, what is it like around Mexico City these days?

EDIT : The FCO advise against all but essential travel to Juarez, and the border area is pretty dodgy, but nothing in particular about Mexico City.

[daallo]

Well, it depends...

México is very large and as such we can't generalize. Ciudad Juárez is a very very dangerous place, there's no control by the government against the drug cartels and violence is everywhere. Some other few small towns are also very dangerous, but they are places you wouldn't go anyway (I don't know their names, for example). Many other border towns are also very dangerous.

However in the majority of touristic places you are pretty safe (maybe Morelia and its state of Michoacán in general which is touristic and beautiful would be an exception, Monterrey is worse everyday too) and in the case of México City it is generally safe as long as you don't go into bad places (they exist in every big city anyway), so being a city of more than 25 million there's everything.

If F1 I can assure you there would be no problems with spectators, teams or anyone unless they really want to go to some ugly places of the city but there is no need to go in there unless you really are stupid or get very lost.