Kimi Raikkonen believes the FIA can learn from historic circuits like Spielberg and Silverstone to improve the racing in Formula 1.
The last race produced arguably the most exciting Grand Prix of the season, as Max Verstappen made his through the field with a number of great battles and overtakes into and after Turn 3.
Last year saw Raikkonen and Lewis Hamilton fly through the field at Silverstone after their collision on Lap 1, and as the sport tries to increase the on-track action, the Finn says circuit design is a crucial factor.
“In Austria, the racing is always quite good over the years. If you take even when I started, there was a lot of overtaking without any DRS,” he said earlier this week.
“I think certain tracks it doesn’t matter what rules, what cars we have they prove overtaking, it’s purely a track related thing. If you take Spa, over the years, there always been good racing there. In some tracks that always happen.”
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Something the Alfa Romeo driver is keen to see more of, however, is “pure overtaking” without aids.
“If you take the old tracks, there was overtaking. Maybe in pure numbers, there was less but with the DRS some of them are not really overtaking, you just go past them,” he claimed
“There was more pure overtaking in those times and in some circuits, it was still possible.”
Beyond overtaking, Raikkonen also thinks other more modern problems like track limits can be addressed by using some ‘old-school’ solutions.
“Before the new tracks came there was much less of these issues because there was gravel or grass, so that was an easy limit,” he explained.
“Yes, you could go there but you’d be pretty lucky if you got away with it and went faster.
“Maybe they try to go a bit more in that way but it also depends a lot on who’s using it, because MotoGP doesn’t like gravel and, obviously, it’s massively expensive for the tracks to change every weekend when somebody else is running,” he noted.
“Sometimes it works well, sometimes less, but overall, since last year there have been much less issues than a few years ago when all that was talked about was track limits.”