How to build your own F1 track

So you want to build your own F1 track? A word of advice: don’t.

It’s going to cost you £200million-£300million, depending where you choose to host your own grand prix.

Oh, and once you’ve actually built the thing, you’ll have to pony up perhaps £20million a year for the privilege of hosting an F1 race – and that figure will rise by 10 per cent every year.

If those figures don’t put you off, then read on – and give Bernie Ecclestone a call, as he loves hearing from people like you…

Dig deep (especially into your own pockets)

Getting accurate figures for the costs of building F1 circuits is tricky, to say the least – for a start, such figures are likely to be commercially sensitive.

‘Headline figures’ for the major elements of a circuit are generally accepted to be fairly similar around the world but, of course, there is always the chance that a lot of the costs involved are ‘off the books’ – F1 isn’t too fussy about which countries it deals with and, of course, Ecclestone has had to buy his way out of a German bribery trial in a verdict which, let’s be clear, meant he’d been found neither innocent nor guilty, but did leave him £60million out of pocket.

Sources such as Formula Money are a good place to start and some figures do leak out – here are some ballpark estimates of the major costs of building a track to F1 standards.

Oh, and don’t think of skimping – motorsport bosses at the FIA grade tracks according to facilities and safety features, and plenty of famous tracks don’t make the all-important Grade 1, including Brands Hatch, Donington, Zandvoort, the Le Mans 24Hour circuit, Kyalami… the list goes on.

If you’re fortunate, you won’t have to move too much soil and rock before laying the foundations for your track or, like the engineers at the Shanghai circuit, ‘float’ the whole thing on swampland.

If you’re not so fortunate, and there are major earthworks and infrastructure challenges, best budget £40million for some heavy lifting (literally).

Build a track, burn some money

Ah, the track. Better have something for those cars to race on (or, if it’s a boring track, for the cars to trundle round in fuel-saving mode on).

You’ll be employing Hermann Tilke, because he’s the go-to guy for F1 track design.

There are only a handful of designers recognised by the FIA and Herr Tilke is the one who does Formula 1 circuits.

By the time he’s wrestled with the landscape, adhered to the FIA’s many safety restrictions and stuck one or two long straights followed by a hairpin (to encourage overtaking, theoretically), you’ll have a track that the drivers will probably like but the public may or may not.

And your bank account will be £40million lighter. In fact, it could be a lot more than that – the Bahrain track (just the track, not the infrastructure) is rumoured to have cost nearer £80million.

For that money, you’ll not just get some straight bits and some bendy bits. You’ll also get elevation changes, carefully modelled cambers, different track surfaces and various bends to challenge the drivers.

Turkey hosted grands prix for only seven years but, in those seven years, F1 fans came to adore the Tilke-designed Turn Eight… drivers pulled 5g for seven seconds, hitting (or missing) four apexes and riding the various bumps of this remarkable left-hander.

Was it value for money? Probably not, as Turkey pulled out of F1 after the 2011 race in a row over … money.

Pits and posh bits

The pitlane may look like a glorified row of lock-ups in the old East End but the price is very much West End penthouse territory, and then some.

That’s in no small part due to F1’s money-spinning Paddock Club, where VIPs get to quaff champagne and look down (literally) on pitstop action.

There’s usually a Paddock Club floor above the pits and, although it’s generally just a big glass-fronted hangar of a room that can be divided with temporary partitions, it’s also huge – it has to accommodate thousands of guests on an F1 weekend and an equally huge number of staff to service them.

Don’t be surprised if your pit/paddock building costs you £40million.

Mind you, it is possible to do it for less – Singapore did its pit and paddock area for £18.5million, and that even included the Media Centre.

Where do we sit?

You sit in another money-pit. The main grandstand at any modern F1 circuit is an opportunity for designers to flaunt their skills – Tilke may be involved again, as it’s not just the track itself he and his team take responsibility for.

Think Sepang’s lotus-leaf grandstands in Malaysia or, for a non-Tilke showpiece, Silverstone’s jagged stand, designed by Populous, the architects behind the London Olympic stadium.

You should certainly expect to cough up at least £25million – Silverstone’s effort came in at about £27million, six years ago but, if you’re building overseas, you may be able to shave a few quid off the cost of construction workers…

Cables. Lots and lots of cables

The electronics and electrical infrastructure at an F1 circuit are a daunting challenge.

Miles and miles of cabling, circuits for lighting, power, timing, computer equipment, safety equipment and, in the case of Singapore, three independent floodlighting circuits to stop things going dark at this night-time race.

There’s no fixed price for circuit electronics but, according to the researchers at F1 business specialists Formula Money, they could put you back £25million.

Make room for Her Majesty’s press

A purpose-built media centre is a must-have – F1 lives or dies by the exposure it brings sponsors and the media is central to this.

This is another cavernous room, wired up for countless monitors and laptops, with as much internet connectivity as you could ever want and the capacity to host press conferences too.

Photographers may have a separate room – with less daylight, to make it easier for them to see the fruits of their labours on-screen (and possibly because so many of them are creatures of the night).

Budget £12million for this though, again, remember Singapore’s trick of including it in the pits/Paddock Club complex.

Ancillary bits…

You may want a building to house some team functions, or an additional bit of track. Heck, you might even want to include a modest hotel as part of the plan – anything that could make you money should be welcomed with open arms.

Put another £12million aside for this though, to be honest, you’re not going to get the Ritz for that sort of cash.

Doctors. We need doctors?

You need a fully-equipped medical centre if you want to host F1 races.

That means plenty of expensive gear including resuscitation equipment and an operating theatre.

The medical centre at Silverstone is a remarkable facility and includes a four-bed resuscitation room, a burns unit, x-ray and ultrasound facilities, a major treatment room, a four-bed drivers’ ward, another four-bed ward for the public and a two-bed minor treatment centre.

Here’s the most amazing thing about the medical centre: you can probably put it together for £4million which, given the other costs you’re facing, has to be classed as a genuine bargain.

HOW much?

That lot adds up to around £200million. Just to get the place built.

Of course, the sky’s the limit when you’ve more money than sense – the Abu Dhabi circuit is rumoured to have cost four times that figure by some measures, and £1.2billion by others.

Incredible though such numbers appear, big building contracts have a habit of running up big bills – the Scottish Parliament building in Edinburgh cost a cool £414million, which was a little more than the £10-£40million estimated when the building was first mooted.

One last thing (hint, it involves more money)

Well done, you’ve spent £200million to £1billion on your circuit (and I’ve no idea if you had to bribe anyone along the way) and now you just have to call up those nice F1 people and tell them you’d like to host a race.

Well, that’s going to cost you another fortune. You see, now you’ve invested in an F1-standard circuit, you’re at the mercy of the sport’s owners – and they have become exceptionally adept at wringing money out of anyone who wants to host a grand prix.

According to Formula Money, the average fee paid by circuits for hosting an F1 race is now around £27million, with the highest such fee about £70million. And the contracts that circuits hold with F1 stipulate that these fees automatically rise by 5-10 per cent every year.

That’s why almost every F1 race is subsidised by taxpayers in one way or another – circuits struggle to break even, even if other industries (hotels, airlines, taxi firms etc) do coin it in on a race weekend. Silverstone is a notable exception to this rule and, as a result, is struggling to make the F1 books balance.

Now, you could decide not to build a new circuit and instead opt for a street circuit… but that’s complicated enough to merit its own article.

Suffice to say, it will cost you at least £40million a year to host a street-circuit race, excluding hosting fees. And you’ll probably have to shut down large parts of a city to do it.

There is no cheap way to host an F1 race. The sport may have started among the hay bales and disused runways of Silverstone in 1950 but, these days, it’s as much about high finance as high speed. If truth be told, it’s more about high finance than high speed.