After having passed under one of the large banked turns on the back part of the circuit, the cars returned after having negotiated a semicircular (and also banked) Curvetta, somewhat north of the current Parabolica. A full lap would start on the driver's left side of the front straight, then went down to the Curva Grande and on to the road circuit. And it was necessary, as the cars went by twice in the course of a lap. The front straight was enormous, close to 100 meters wide. What they saw was a 10 km long (now believed to be somewhat shorter than that) road/oval combination.
Monza f1 2018 drivers#
On August 20, several local drivers took turns driving Fiats around the track as officials made speeches and fans gawked at the wonderful new track. After the road surface was completed, it was allowed to cure over the summer, a novel concept for the time. The track was constructed in 110 days, using 3,500 workers, with the majority of the focus on the banked oval. A compromise was hammered out, where the speed oval and some connecting roads would be constructed, along with upgrading several of the existing roads and paths in the park. The original plans called for a wide variety of roads and curves, but this soon ran into opposition, because of the proposed removal of most of the trees and foliage of the park. The circuit was constructed in a royal park just north of the town of Monza in the spring of 1922. But the track has had a large number of configurations and revisions through the years. Monza currently is a complex with two major (and overlapping) components: the boomerang-shaped road course, varying in length over the years between 5.7 and 6.3 km and the high speed oval, originally slightly banked asphalt, but with huge banked concrete curves built in 1955, only to be abandoned less than 15 years later.