25/09/2010
NEWS STORY
Mat Coch writes:
The Turn 10 chicane may have cost Adrian Sutil $10,000 in practice however, fellow drivers are worried there may be an even higher price paid if a car hits trouble on the approach to the corner.
Running wide during the second practice session on Friday, Sutil's Force India climbed the fifteen centimetre high kerbing, launching the front of his car into the air and breaking the front suspension as it landed.
Drivers are concerned that the changes to the corner and its lack of run off could turn a minor incident into a major accident. "Last year we had a Red Bull brake failure into Turn 1. If that had happened there he would be way over the fence," Lewis Hamilton told reporters.
"The chicane is always very tricky anyway because you arrive at 160 or 170 mph and then there's no run off area behind it," he explains. "So you brake at just after 100 metres, and from then on there's maybe a hundred metres to the wall, maybe less."
Raised in the drivers briefing ahead of the weekend as a concern, there is nothing that can be done for the corner this year. While that worries the drivers, they accept the FIA is doing its best, and are working with the organising body to improve the area for when the F1 circus returns to Singapore in 2011.
"We're working with the FIA," Hamilton continued, "just to try and maybe come up with another solution to make it a little bit safer. But I think it's important that all of us drivers make a point, because we're the ones on the track putting our lives at risk."
After his initial reluctance to join the Grand Prix Drivers Association, whose charter outlines driver safety as a main priority, Hamilton became a member at the beginning of the 2009 season.