Shanghai inaugurated its brand new Formula 1 circuit yesterday, marking international auto racing's arrival in China and a new milestone in the nation's rise as an international sports venue.
Competition at the track, designed by Germany's Hermann Tilke, kicked off with the China Circuit Championship, which featured touring car and Formula Renault events.
Shanghai will also host the China Grand Prix, the first ever F1 event in the country, on Sept. 26. The race is the second new event added to this year's F1 season after Bahrain, and a major step into new Asian markets.
Auto racing is still a novelty to most Chinese and organizers tried hard to imbue Sunday's event with all the noise and glamor associated with professional motor sports.
During a break, the Ferrari F1 team's test driver Gerhard Berger zipped around the track in one of the team's reserve race cars and more than 60 of the company's low-slung yellow and red sports cars also did a lap.
Formula Renault racers included Hong Kong singer Aaron Kwok, who declared the track "the best."
"It's very hard, very exciting, especially the first turn," said Kwok, who blew a tire and failed to finish his race.
In the pit area, race cars revved their engines while female models roamed the concourse in skimpy outfits emblazoned with team logos.
"Today is a huge landmark for auto racing in China and we will work our hardest to stage a successful F1 race,'' Chinese racing official Shi Tianshu said.
Nearly two years in the making, the Shanghai International Circuit rises out of former farmland in the Shanghai suburb of Jiading, home to the city's bustling car industry.
Its 5.4km circuit features a punishing 14 turns, some on 8 percent grades. Seating areas can accommodate up to 200,000 people, about 1 percent of the population of greater Shanghai.
"It's a very fast, very technical track," said Portuguese racer Rodolfo Avila, who won the morning's Formula Renault event.
Avila said the track had a similar feel to Tilke's other works, including the Bahrain circuit that debuted this season and Malaysia's Sepang. But he suggested drivers would need considerable practice to attune themselves to Shanghai's turns.
"The corners are very technical. It's not a very easy track to learn," said Avila, standing beside his knee-high speedster in the pit area.
Several hundred spectators filled about half of the main glass and steel grandstand, which rises 10 stories above the track and is linked to the pit area by wedge shaped overhead passages.
Race organizers reported no major hitches during the weekend's events, although guests had to be repeatedly shooed off of the pit lane.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier