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I watched some amazing bike races at Hockenheimring.  Probably a piece of what got me hooked on motorcycle racing.  Slipstreaming duels with lead packs that stayed together even if they all changed positions on every straight. Not all redesigns of circuits are equivalent.  Spa kept the character of the circuit even in the bit that shortened the old course.  I'd still prefer the original Silverstone to the current version, but it still keeps some of the character.  However, what they did to Hockenheimring is more of an amateur surgeon attacking a leg with a hack saw. What's funny is that F1 goes to other parts of the world, and builds tracks in wide open areas.  They build tracks in the middle of a desert.  They built a track in middle-of-nowhere south Korea.  But they never recreate a fast flowing track with high-speed turns.  Even when they could put acres of run off room around it for safety.  F1 likes really bad race tracks.  F1 has destroyed the good tracks that they inherited from previous days, and the new ones F1 builds are all junk.  Middle of Korea and they put in a whole section of the track that's tight 90 deg corners like a city street track.  Middle of Texas with lots of room, and they put in a bunch of slow speed twisty turny corners around a tower and music venue.  The one thing F1 does not tolerate is a great, fast flowing race track. The author speaks of high speed racing as if its somehow wrong.  That's the F1 mindset talking.  F1 does not have a single great race that captures the world's imagination.  They promote the car parade in front of rich people at Monaco like its one, but its  not.  That's just F1 envy of having to race on the same day as one of the world's truly great races.  The author complains about the 'brutal speeds', but that is what makes racing great.  Indianapolis is one of the world's great races, with long straits and fast corners, with challenges to drivers to hold the turn and not to chicken out and lift off the loud pedal.  LeMans is famous for its long straight, which fortunately is not ruined because it was long enough to accomodate chicanes and still be long and fast.  But, F1 doesn't go to LeMans.  F1 chooses to race and the eye-sore of a track at Paul Ricard, and even then had brown stains in their driver suits at the thought of a long straight and insisted on a chicane.  F1 came to Indy, and was scared to death of the real track, and built this bogus excuse of an infield track on which to race.  They took just one of Indy's famous corners and took it not at the end of a long straight but as a part of the section that came out of the infield.  Even then, some drivers had the obvious  brown stains in their driver suits and whined and complained about that corner even taken at slower speeds.  F1 hates good race tracks.  Good race tracks find out who's got courage and who lacks it.  Good tracks have those sorts of turns.  F1 hates that.  F1 wants corporate sponsers to pick the winners, not the heart of the drivers.  F1 wants a race that is a predictable procession.  Good tracks provide opportunities for great racing to decide the result, and leave room for the kid with a giant heart to find a way to beat the corporate drivers and their budgets with just a lead foot and courage. Even when F1 builds a track in the middle of nowhere, where they could put in fast corners and long and chicane-free straits with lots of runoff room for safety, they refuse to do it and instead build the typical F1 twisty-turny, no passing allowed type of track. Next time they build a track in the middle of a desert or the middle of Texas where everything is bigger, it would be great if someone would think, Old Hockenheimring was a great track before they ruined it, but here we've got the room to do it right.  Yeah, I know I'm in dream mode now, as money and F1 and the real world would never, ever be smart enough to do that.