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An overlay of the old fearsome Spa circuit (courtesy of: www.speedhunters.com/2012/08/spa-francorchamps-temple-speed/). The Red line strip shows the route that is more commonly used now. The chicane as Malmedy didn't survive, and Stavelot was eventually bypassed by the addition of a banked curve at the end of the Holowell Straight. Sportscars ruled the roost around Spa once the F1 cars stopped going there: Jacky Ickx lapped the 14km track in his Ferrari 312PB in a time 3 minutes 12.7 seconds for the 1973 Spa 1000km, a round of the World Sportscar Championship. That meant an average speed of around 165mph – all the more frightening when you consider that the quality of road surface was nowhere as good as today. Remember -- it also rains a lot at Spa, oftentimes only on parts of the circuit.
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In 2016 I treated myself to a copy of Brian Redman’s excellent memoir of a dangerous decade (1965 – 1975) – ‘Daring Drivers, Deadly Tracks’.
He had some fascinating things to say about his experiences driving the old Spa circuit.
I highly recommend this book.
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Brian Redman: Daring Drivers, Deadly Tracks.
A racer's memoir of a dangerous decade
1965-1975.
A lap of Spa-Francorchamps.
"Allow me to take you back to 1970 and share a lap of the original 8.7-mile track - what historians now like to call 'l'ancien circuit' - in my Porsche 917K.
I'll begin at La Source, the final hairpin corner where I progressively squeezed the accelerator until my car was nearly straight, and then mashed the pedal to the floor to begin the downhill dive. As I hurtled past the pits and start/finish line, I slipped from second gear into third as my speed built to about 160mph. A tap on the brakes at the bottom allowed me to swivel through the Eau Rouge S-bend, charge uphill at about 140mph and tiptoe through the right/left Raidillon sequence.
Snatching fourth gear (top in a 917K), I blasted up the gradually rising Kemmel straight with speed continuing to increase. In every gear, I revved to a maximum of 8,000rpm; one missed shift and delicate valves would have confronted flailing pistons, resulting in a thoroughly broken engine.
As the sweeping Les Combes left-hander rushed into view at 170mph, I braked hard, grabbed third gear and, using every inch of the road, opened the throttle to surge down another steep hill towards the flat-out right called Burnenville. Still in top gear, I hammered through the connecting shute into Malmedy and onto the Masta straight, that narrow 1½-mile country road where I pushed the car to it's top speed - 214mph. I tried not to think about this as I neared the Masta kink, possibly the most intimidating turn in all of motor racing. At that velocity, I couldn't indulge even the briefest of unnecessary lifts without losing precious seconds (and my drive). Left/right through there at 180mph and onto the Hollowell straight, flat out again at top speed for another 1½ miles.
Stavelot, a long right-hander, was taken in top gear at about 170mph and followed by a fast left that promptly shifted to a 160mph right with it's apex at the corner of a stone building. Straight uphill now towards the blind, flat-out Les Carrières, still gaining speed into an equally blind 170mph left called Blanchimont, where a narrow patch of grass was all that separated the track from the a steel barrier. A final uphill straight returned me to La Source, the first-gear corner where this lap began.
Ploughing around this slow turn allowed a few seconds to breath, flex and relax before it was time to repeat the exercise - 14 more times."
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The original course was an 8.7-mile triangle of rustic byways anchored at each corner by the villages of Francorchamps, Malmedy and Stavelot.
The circuit had been conceived in the 1920's for cars with as little as 50bhp capable of less than 100mph, and continued as a magnificent folly onto which we threw 620bhp machines at over 200mph with ill-advised eagerness. By the time of my debut, Spa had already earned a reputation for being an unforgiving circuit, even in an era when safety concerned few drivers and absolutely no team managers.
Apart from a single hairpin corner, the original Spa was a ribbon of long straights punctuated by blazingly fast curves, all to be negotiated as aggressively as cross-ply tyres would allow. If, at full throttle, a driver exited the Malmedy corner 3mph faster than his competitors, he carried that additional speed down the full 1½-mile length of the Masta straight, and did so again on the equally long Hollowell straight.
Consider the arithmetic: at 214mph a Porsche 917 covered the length of a football pitch (105 yards) in a single second and did so for about 26 long seconds on each of those 2 straights. If the speeds of the two competitive cars were exactly the same at all other parts of the track, the driver who was 3mph faster on the Hollowell and Masta straights would pull out an advantage of 141½ car lengths each and every lap of his 15-lap stint, and would be nearly 1,150 yards ahead when his co-driver took over- total domination.
Conversely, a driver's tiniest miscue through the Masta kink - a quick left/right in the middle of the Masta straight - or the slightest lift at the Burnenville, Stavelot or Blanchimont corners increased his lap time not by just a few tenths of a second but by two or even three full seconds, costing as much as 1¼ miles during his turn at the wheel. Such a performance was unthinkable and would have led swiftly to unemployment.
More sobering was the harsh punishment for even the smallest mistake or slightest error in judgement.
A racing car with sticky tyres spinning on grainy asphalt will scrub off speed, but the tyres of one that departs the circuit onto the slippery grass sacrifice most of their grip and the car loses little momentum. Unimpeded, it could travel a great distance at a disturbingly rapid rate.
At Spa however, no car could slide very far before encountering a house, a tree, a telegraph pole, a wall, an embankment, a ditch or a wire fence garrotte. These hazards were compounded by the provincial state of the countryside and the region's unpredictable weather. One part of the track might bask in sunshine while another was awash in rain. Without radios, drivers had no warning about deteriorating conditions and often would rush into a veil of water that hadn't been there on the previous lap. It was accepted that crashes on the original Spa circuit often meant serious injury, or worse.
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The incipient pro - 1967.
Once again I was invited to join Peter Sutcliffe in his GT40 for the 1,000Kms of 1967.
Even after a full year of driving, the circuit's pace was no less disquieting but time and practice were moulding me into a true professional. I had learned the trick of burying reason under layers of confidence and pretense.
Spa is in the lush forests of the Ardennes, where in May - the driest month - it rains more days than not.
Denny Hulme, New Zealand's only Formula 1 World Champion and a racer known for his unflinching bravery, shared this advice of the original circuit.
'Spa? In the rain? Shit. Park it.'
Kiwi wisdom.