Tracks of the trade

Clive Bowen takes circuit design beyond just building a track, the aim being to create commercial successes
By Adam Sweeting

You want to build a new motor racing circuit, so who do you call? Recent evidence suggests that the only number in everybody’s BlackBerry is that of Hermann Tilke, whose Tilke Engineering has left its footprints all over Sepang, Bahrain, Shanghai, Istanbul and Valencia, and has overhauled several older Formula 1 circuits including Fuji and Hockenheim. The enigmatic Hermann has even been spotted casting plumbline and slide rule over the ongoing Donington development.

But there’s more than one way to plough up a brownfield site or a heat-hazed expanse of desert and adapt it for tyre-smoking motor sport action. Ask Clive Bowen, MD of Apex Circuit Design Ltd, one of a handful of companies worldwide who can credibly put themselves in the frame for major motor sport infrastructure projects.

“There are really only four or five companies out there who have the wherewithal to design an F1 circuit,” says Bowen (right). “There’s Hermann Tilke, and there’s ourselves in partnership with various architects and engineers. Then there’s Alan Wilson in the States [of Wilson Motorsport Inc] and Ron Dixon in Australia [of D3 Motorsports]. There are others, but in truth that’s your choice.”

In the dozen years of its existence, Apex has designed or upgraded 30 circuits in locations including South America, the Middle East, Russia, the USA and the UK, and has a similar number of projects in the pipeline. It worked on Silverstone’s proposed but stalled new pit and paddock and is steaming ahead with a 2007 commission to develop the Alabama Motorsports Park in Mobile, adding a kart track, road circuit and dirt racing oval to the site’s existing NASCAR oval. Apex’s Autodrome Domodedovo project outside Moscow has been rocked by the credit crunch and is still burdened with a large on-site lake that needs draining, but Bowen is confident that the new circuit will be ready to host a round of the FIA GT World Championship in August 2010. And he pauses from a healthy lunch of mozzarella salad and mineral water to plunge into his briefcase and pull out a sheaf of plans for a new kart track which will slot in alongside the Bahrain International F1 circuit.

In his casual blue suit and blue and white checked shirt, Bowen is trim, focused and humming with energy, though he insists his mirrored sunglasses aren’t an exercise in über-cool but merely a response to a bout of conjunctivitis. It’s like talking to a man with a nuclear-powered brain, as he whizzes through potted surveys of projects completed and unveils reams of plans on the go (“it’s like a tap, you have to turn it off, not me,” he chortles, as we run up to the 90-minute mark).

The current jewel in the Apex crown – or one of several, as Bowen would protest – is the recently-signed deal to design and oversee construction of France’s new F1 circuit at Flins-sur-Seine, to the west of Paris. Apex’s UK consortium, which includes its regular partners Scott Wilson Group plc and Ridge & Partners LLP, is teaming up with a French group led by architects Wilmotte and Associates, with Alain Prost contributing technical input about the track’s racing characteristics (“he isn’t called Le Professeur for no reason, he’s given us fantastic feedback”). For once, the project didn’t fall into the lap of the all-conquering Tilke.

“We had a genuine opportunity to compete on a level playing field because it was a publicly-funded project which had to go through a public tender process,” Bowen explains. “Jean-Michel Wilmotte is the Norman Foster of France, an amazing guy. He’s expansive and entertaining and runs a very good architectural practice which has no knowledge of motor sport, and they’re the first to admit it. I don’t think a bid without a non-French lead consultant could have succeeded, and we’ve learned an enormous amount about how to develop a public project. It’s a good enough relationship that Wilmotte have asked us to get involved in other motor sport projects, in France and elsewhere, so Hallelujah!”

Arching over all his work with Apex – a group of companies which includes Apex Motorsport Marketing and Apex Motorsport Management alongside the circuit design division – is his concept of his role as a “masterplanner”. Bowen graduated from Portsmouth University as a mechanical engineer in 1986, but the philosophy he has developed at Apex is that circuit design is just one aspect of an overall approach that pictures a racing venue as a “destination”. A circuit development can expect to earn its keep when leisure, retail and business facilities form part of the planning package, while race organisers will also need a variety of support services, equipment and personnel to ensure that events run smoothly. Apex can supply the lot. It’s here, Bowen suggests, that a demarcation line between Apex and Tilke can be drawn.

“We get involved very early in the life of a project rather than being parachuted in at the point where funds have been raised, which Hermann Tilke has traditionally done. Often he’ll be invited in when a government has made contact with Formula One Management, where there’s a level of agreement that suggests that an F1 race is in the offing, at which point Hermann gets a phone call.

“By contrast, we’re involved right at the early doors in discussions, and this idea of establishing the viability of a project is self-preservation on our part, rather than putting too much investment in right at the front. Unless you can raise 50 to 100 million bucks, most of these projects are pipe dreams for enthusiasts. I’d say as a rough rule of thumb one in 10 enquiries is serious, one in 10 of those might lead to a serious masterplan, and one in 10 of those projects will end up being built.”

Bowen can enthuse about the physical thrill of driving round a favourite circuit such as Paul Ricard (“because you’ve got that sodding great Mistral straight and almost unlimited permutations to drive”), but he’s able to make the logical leap between the technical design that goes into a track layout and the planning and business skills necessary to take it from drawing board to physical reality.

“I would hate to lose the design input because I love it with a passion, and designing tracks is a raison d’etre. But I have to help people walk through the entire process of building a race track, and there is as much genuine design in masterplanning as there is in designing a race circuit. The idea is that you should get a cocktail of uses out of a single parcel of land. At least 30 per cent of the cost of a project is bringing power or drainage or a road network to the site, so if you can share that same infrastructure to service a theme park or a hotel, that’s a sensible bit of pragmatic land use and investment.”

To illustrate his point, he flourishes the drawings of the Bahrain kart track, pointing out some of the key design features.

“Rather than just focusing on building a sexy kart circuit we wanted to create a destination, a place where people would go irrespective of motor sport. We came up with the idea of building this piazza here, and the idea was to suck people into this zone which will be a mix of merchandising, restaurants, a shisha bar in the middle for the guys to go and smoke hubbly-bubblies… A destination should appeal to anybody, including women who are there because their husband or boyfriend or son is racing. So it’s not like dragging your partner to a windswept Silverstone and she’s saying ‘I’m cold, I’m hungry, I’m bored, let’s go home’.”

As the operators of Donington will be painfully aware as they labour to make the venue Grand Prix-ready, Bernie-compatible and FIA-certificated, the cost of building a circuit can be considerably higher than the consequent asset value of the circuit itself – “just ask Jonathan Palmer,” says Bowen. “He bought a bunch of UK circuits for considerably less than it would cost to build them.” Therefore, “you have to find another way of building capital value; where else do you look except adding value to the land?”

Apex often forms partnerships with property developers, from whom it appears to have learned the crafty trick of boosting land value by changing its designated use.

“If you buy a parcel of rural land for a dollar and it has no planning permission on it, and you invest enough to prove to the local authority that it could be used for housing or light industrial or sport, the fact that it gets a change of use changes its asset value, so your dollar parcel of land becomes a $100 parcel of land. It’s a process of turning barren or brownfield land into a credible project for investment.”

But lest it be thought that Bowen is merely a monetarist fat-cat disguised as a motor sport enthusiast, let us take a spin through his man-of-action past. True, before Apex became established he could be found handling contract and project management for deeply unhip conglomerates like Unilever and Johnson & Johnson, and even worked in Guangchow for United Biscuits, but he also led a parallel life crammed with boats and cars. He vividly recalls May 1, 1994, but not only because it was the day Ayrton Senna died. Bowen found himself otherwise engaged.

“I was racing in a regatta in Plymouth, and we finished sufficiently high up to qualify as first reserve for the British squad for the World Championships that summer at La Rochelle. One of the three teams in front of us couldn’t attend, so we got the call, and I represented Great Britain at a level of sport I never believed I’d attain. We were sailing a J24, and I raced them in national and European championships for several years. It was a hairy-arsed version of a Laser; they called it ‘the Laser with the lid’.”

Sensing he’d reached his limit in sailing, Bowen was looking for new challenges when he bumped into Creighton Brown, motor sport entrepreneur and long-time partner of Ron Dennis at Project Four Racing and subsequently McLaren.

“Creighton is one of the major reasons for me being involved with motor sport. He encouraged me to get involved professionally, because his argument was that it’s a cottage industry even at the highest levels, run by enthusiasts with big budgets maybe, but ultimately run by people who believe passionately in the sport. That’s changed, but it was the case until recently.”

Brown and Bowen bought a kart together – “Creighton showed you can be 60 years old and still be a child at heart” – and after a couple of seasons of kart racing, Bowen upped the ante by buying a couple of Van Diemen cars. He ran them in Formula Ford in the mid-90s (“a salutary lesson, because it’s an extremely good way of losing money”), then spent a year doing some engineering work with Martin Hines, karting veteran and nurturer of young talent via his Zip Young Guns team. In 2000 Bowen got a call from West Surrey Racing’s Dick Bennetts who wanted him to manage WSR’s commercial and engineering activities. This gave him scope to develop his design and planning abilities, running WSR’s MG BTCC team while exploring the intricacies of circuit design.

“It was brilliant. I’d already started the design work, and now I had access to draughtsmen, so when they weren’t designing bits for an MG we could use them to design the corner of a track. That’s an example of using infrastructure for double use, and it was a great way to learn about real racing, everything from how to get a car homologated to working with race engineers.”

It was also a source of priceless practical information about motor racing.

“Someone like [driver] Anthony Reid is a master of explaining the handling of a car. His description of how a car would settle into a corner and behave through a corner gave me a much deeper understanding of the relationship between the car and the track. But I also realised that if you ask two drivers the same question you get two different answers, so when we have a new circuit design project I always ask different drivers for their opinions so we don’t come up with ‘me too’ answers every time.”

It’s not difficult to switch Bowen into engineering track-speak. Before you know it he’ll be off on a dissertation about grip, gradients and radii, or explaining how Apex uses the Matlab programming language to emulate racing car performance at any chosen location in a new circuit design.

“We can play with the topography. It’s a Machiavellian intent,” he says, with a clandestine smile. “We take great pleasure in creating an environment where there’s an opportunity for a mistake to be made, but in a safe way. Pat Symonds refers to them as ‘mistake generators’. For instance what we did with turns three through to seven in Dubai [Apex masterplanned the Autodrome, below] was to create a sequence of high, medium and low-speed curves, and it created one of those rare occasions where you can encourage a pass because of the corner sequencing, rather than just through aerodynamic slipstreaming.”

Lately, issues of sustainability and eco-friendliness have become paramount in motor sport, from draconian budget-slashing in F1 to issues of energy efficiency or spectator access at tracks. Bowen has been working on solutions to various environmental concerns arising from the Flins-sur-Seine project, and insists all this means a bonanza of fresh opportunities.

“It’s the future for motor sport,” he declares, “as long as everybody within the sport recognises that we need to be kinder to the globe. Richard Parry-Jones [fabled Ford executive] always said the challenge of racing and the need for speed will never go away, it’s just that the tools we use have to change to improve their impact on the environment. For instance there’s already road car technology which lets you have an exciting driving experience while consuming only half as much juice, so we need to apply it to motor sport. There has to be some kind of future to leave behind.”

*****

Anatomy of a race track by Clive Bowen

The 3km (1.86-mile) Autodrome Domededovo has been tailored to fit a remarkably tight 34-hectare (84-acre) footprint, yet offers a good mix of high, medium and low-speed corners and tremendous gradient change – half of the track is built onto the side of a natural hill. It has been conceived to be built in two phases, the first still scheduled for completion in 2009, with a 1.9km (1.2-mile) Club circuit which peels off along the main straight to rejoin at turn eight. We have intentionally created a small, welcoming paddock space, offering great visibility and superb architecture by our partners at Ridge. The circuit will be used mainly by corporate and private clients – as well as nascent Russian motor
sport – and is scheduled to host the FIA GT World Championship in 2010.

“Turn one is a tight, right-hand uphill hairpin, with a crest just after the apex which will result in both instability and poor exit traction for cars set up for high-speed grip. This is a compound, tightening radius ‘mistake-generating’ corner with a very late apex, offering opportunities for passing under braking at the end of the pit straight or out-accelerating from the corner, depending on car set-up. “

“The sequence from Turn two to turn five utilises the natural grade of the hill section, with a long, medium-speed climbing left-hand corner with a crest on the late apex exit and a compression on the apex of the right-hand kink of Turn five. tyre degradation will be an issue through Turn four. a car set up for speed and stability may benefit, though at the cost of traction out of Turns one and 10.“

“The entry to the medium-speed Turn six is the highest point on the circuit and has a blind crest on turn-in with a significant grade drop down to Turn seven. while not an overtaking sequence, the approach to the corner and the subsequent sequence is intentionally engineered to feel like a roller coaster ride. ”

“The kinked straight from Turns nine to 10 mimics the line of trees adjacent to the highway to the right of the track. it is essential to establish maximum corner exit speed – requiring a moderate approach speed exit from the roller coaster of Turns six and seven – to achieve competitive speed before the final corner, Turn 10.”

“This circuit is aimed at the amateur enthusiast as much as the racer and Turn eight is the highest speed corner, with plenty of asphalt run-off (all run-off areas use this material) to give confidence to drivers to experience a high-speed, high g-force bend.”

“The early turn-in to Turn 10 from the highest speed on track – the preceding Turn eight is the fastest corner – should encourage multiple lines. and the expectation of slipstreaming along the preceding straight may result in passing attempts under braking.“

“Turn 10, the final corner, is an opening radius left-hand hairpin, the idea being to allow for a short apex – the transition from deceleration to acceleration being limited to a few metres only – and to commence acceleration onto the straight as early as possible to maximise speed before braking for Turn one.“

“The tight footprint of the site limits the length of the main straight, although we have achieved a length of 700m despite a footprint only 30 per cent of our usual target for a Category two circuit. The track is ‘siamesed’ to permit two separate configurations and the pitwall access allows the split to be placed, unusually for a road course, along the straight. “