Boo, bah, Tilke, grumble. We know the drill by now. Take an old, established Formula One track desperate to reclaim its old status on the world stage, hand the blueprints to that dastardly menace Hermann Tilke, and watch him tear the heart and soul out of the track, as he produces a stunted and neutered version of the circuit.
Yes, name a blast-from-the-past track that has reappeared on F1's calendar recently and chances are Tilke has had a hand in ruining it. For example, the daunting original Fuji Speedway, venue for that most bizarre of F1 title deciders in 1976, when James Hunt claimed the title after the still-scarred Niki Lauda decided he'd much rather park his car than risk death on the sodden track, was turned into this rotten mess for its brief cameo appearances on the F1 schedule in 2007 and 2008, before even the circuit owners themselves got bored of watching F1 cars racing apologetically around the twisty dross of a layout and pulled out of F1 entirely. Then there was the A1-Ring. A circuit that actually produced some decent racing, and inspired an earlier feature in this series, but was a shadow of the glorious (and also, to be fair, stupidly dangerous) Osterreichring. Compare the drama of this with the eunuch-ised version that debuted in 1997.
So yes, so far, so dreadful for Mr Tilke. And that's before we even get started on the horror that is the Bahrain International Circuit. But what about Hockenheim. Between 2001 and 2002, Tilke and his magic pencil weaved their merry magic on Germany's premier circuit and turned it from a flat-out and chaotic 215mph blast through the surrounding forest land into a more 'modern' layout. Which in Tilke-speak essentially involves removing the bit that had character and adding a ruddy long straight with a hairpin at the end.
The changes produced a predictable outpouring of anger from F1 fans over the perceived sanitisation of one of F1's few remaining traditional tracks, where cars had merrily raced since 1970 with little changes to the layout, and seemed to add to the view that the modern F1 calendar was becoming little more than an identikit Tilkedrome festival, which admittedly, it is. But was old-Hock really all that? Well no, it wasn't. For all of it's charm and character, it was also anachronistic, dangerous, remarkably fan-unfriendly and often fairly dull. Plus it was bloody annoying on Grand Prix 2.
That is not to say that olde-Hock didn't produce good races. There was the nailbiting tactical three-way love-in of 1986, the shock and emotion of Gerhard Berger's final GP win in 1997 (a result that came 12 months after he had been robbed of the 1996 win through an inept Renault engine) and the first-lap carnage and engine-based heartache for Juan Montoya in 2001. But while it would be churlish to suggest that the old track doesn't deserve to be remembered as a good F1 venue, to suggest that the newer design hasn't improved it would be equally questionable.
There can be no doubt that there is something slightly crotch-tingling about a lap of the old circuit. Leaving the slightly anodyne stadium section aside, the rest of the lap was a proper blast from F1's past, back when drivers raced through trees and forests and all sorts of trackside dangers. But as good as it looked on television, for fans at the circuit it was a singularly frustrating place to watch the sport. Even at the chaotic and thrilling 2000 race, the penultimate event at olde-Hock, most of the action itself happened out in the forest, well away from the grandstands.
The 2000 race also infamously raised safety concerns over the track, after a demented and unhappy ex-Mercedes employee dawdled onto the side of the track after correctly assuming that the trackside security around the 4.2 mile circuit wasn't really up to all that much. The fan's protest against his former employers, which involved him displaying the remarkably inefficient slogan "Mercedes Benz, who knew about my health problems, offered me a job I could not do and then sacked me for physical ineptitude after 20 years service" biroed onto a rain mac, thankfully ended with him being restrained and everyone escaping unscathed, but the implication of the incident was clear. The safety record of the track wasn't helped when later on Jean Alesi and Pedro Diniz collided in a bone-jarring accident at one of the three chicanes.
So, the track was unsafe and unwelcoming for fans. Added to that, it was also (whisper it) slightly boring. Aside from the twiddly stadium section, the rest of the track was three long straights and three pitifully slow chicanes. As far as memorable corners went, it was right up there with AVUS. In all practical ways, depositing history and dewy-eyed nostalgia into the bin marked 'irrelevant' for the moment, and the time seemed to be right to change things.
So gone was the old-style point-n-blast-n-then-brake-like-a-madman-for-that-ruddy-chicane layout, and in came the Tilke-special, or 'Hockenhalf' as some have christened it. True, it lacks the immediate recognisability of the old track, and yes it now lacks a certain something to set it apart from the rest of the tracks on the calendar, and certainly it is a bit sad to look at photos of reclaimed land where a racetrack once stood. But in the same way that you don't really go to Gordon Ramsey's restaurant because of how he looks, equally you shouldn't really judge a motorsports venue on the number of trees there are at the edge of the track.
Derivative though the new course may be, but it does allow for some decent racing. Witness this fun here, or possibly this, or even this, or some of this. All good racing action, and crucially, all in full view of the baying crowds in the grandstands.
So, in conclusion, olde-Hockenheim was of it's time. A track that threw up plenty of action, but one that like its sister German track the Nordschleife made no real sense in the modern, fan-and-media-centric world of Formula One. And what Tilke has done to the circuit is to allow it to remain relevant, which is hardly a bad thing.
And if you're still not a fan of nu-Hock, then at least you can be thankful that we're not at nu-Nurby this year.
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