Lewis Hamilton did not hold back as he expressed his discontent at the track during the inaugural Miami Grand Prix weekend. But Hamilton could get his wish granted next year after Miami GP boss Tom Garfinkel revealed talks with the FIA and F1 to make positive changes.
Drivers blessed the Miami International Autodrome track with turbulent FP1 and FP2 sessions featuring both Carlos Sainz and Valtteri Bottas crashing into the wall. Race officials designed the chicane for turn 14/15 to generate mistakes, and it certainly fulfilled its purpose.
After many drivers exceeded track limits during practice and qualifying on Friday and Saturday, Hamilton joined Lando Norris and others in lambasting the section. The seven-time world champion was particularly frustrated with the tightness of turn 14/15, comparing it to a ‘B&Q car park’.
He complained: “It’s kind of crazy. In this day and age, they should be able to make a flat road relatively easy, but there are fricking big, big bumps in so many places where the track joins up somewhere else. I don’t know if they’ll be able to grind that overnight and improve it, but otherwise, it’s quite nice to drive except for the chicane.
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“That might be… I don’t want to put that quote out there. I’ll hold onto that. But it’s so tight. It reminds me of being in a B&Q car park when I was six, seven years old in a go-kart going in between cars. It’s a corner that maybe in the future they can remove, and it will improve the track.”
In response, Garfinkel admitted the part of the track under the exit ramp of a Miami freeway that has drawn the most criticism wasn’t included to add entertainment but to instead slow cars down. However, he is willing to make changes for next season’s race.
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“We’re open to changing whatever we need to to make the track better,” Garfinkel explained. “I think the challenge with the chicane… I don’t know if we communicated well enough about why it exists and where it exists. It was a bit of a necessary evil, if you will, to get the track big enough to create the rest of the race track to be great.
“That’s an area where we have to really slow people down because we didn’t have enough run-off space. I think, from talking to some folks at F1 and the FIA, there’s an opportunity to maybe change that a little bit to make it better.”
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