Our Brazilian Track Record

07 | 10 | 09
Our long haul trip to Brazil will take us to a track which is renowned for its bumpy nature and the fact that it’s at altitude.

It’s also a bit of a roller coaster, from the steep drop at the first set of corners to the grid which is actually on a slope and gets steeper towards the back, making race start for poor qualifiers even more of a challenge.

And that bumpy surface isn’t the only pain in the neck for the drivers because, like Istanbul Park, Autodromo Carlos Pace is one of the few anti-clockwise tracks.

It boasts instantly recognisable corners, such as the Senna Esses (that steep first corner drop), the hairpins at turns eight and eleven and the sweeping final corner, which leads up to the start-finish line. Each of the 71 laps is only 4.3km long, considerably shorter than most other circuits, and the lap times are reduced even further by the high speeds the cars attain through the Cafe Corner and along the home straight. The fastest lap time around Sao Paulo is a blink-and-you-miss-it 1:11.473 set by Juan Pablo Montoya in 2004.

Often called Interlagos (two lakes, now no longer there) from the district in which it’s situated, the circuit is actually named Autodromo Carlos Pace Sao after the Brazilian F1 driver who died in 1977. The circuit has been home to the Brazilian Grand Prix on and off since the event was first staged in 1973 in a race fittingly won by Brazilian Emerson Fittipaldi.

The race moved to Rio de Janerio during the late ’70s and’ 80s, but returned to Sao Paulo in 1990 after a major re-development during local hero Ayrton Senna’s heyday. A trip to Senna’s grave in the city, to pay respects to the three-time world champion who died in 1994, is often one of the pilgrimages fans, drivers and members of the Paddock make when visiting Brazil.

Last year the race was the final date in the calendar and famously saw Lewis Hamilton clinch the world title from race winner Felipe Massa in the final lap and our own Sebastiasn Vettel charge to a brilliant fourth place in the rain.

Our own track record here looks like this:

2006
Speed 11th
Liuzzi 13th

2007
Liuzzi 13th
Vettel DNF

2008
Vettel 4th
Bourdais 14th