Track Descriptions and Ratings by Tim Trant
Thanks a lot Tim. That must count as the most heroic enterprise yet undertaken on behalf of the Sumo readership, especially when you take into account the short deadline I gave you. It is interesting how the distortion of scale that comes in when you convert a real-life circuit into a game board screws up certain tracks. As one of my group remarked when we played Siverstone, "This is supposed to be one of the fastest tracks on the Grand Prix Circuit. So how come you never get to use top gear?" I have a theory that the safety improvements, in the form of chicanes, that the circuits were forced to introduce as cars got ever faster have made them less good for gaming purposes. At Speed Circuit the Monza track is genuinely fast. In part this is because the different movement system makes compression less of a problem, but there is more to it than that. If you compare the two game boards, you will see that the new Monza has a chicane that the old one did not and also that two corners which in the earlier game could be taken almost flat out have now been slowed down to `2's. This is not bad designing on the part of the Formule De team; it is the way the real circuits have gone. I think I shall write to Max Mosley and complain.
Stuart Dagger
On to Don't Throw Stones at Father's Glass Eye or back to the review of 6 Nimmt!.