In his 23 IndyCar starts across four seasons with as many different teams, Luca Filippi showed flashes of the pace that had taken him to six victories in GP2 between 2006 and 2012. That was never more clearly on display than at his favourite circuit in Toronto, where the Italian scored his only series podium in 2015. He finished runner-up to CFH Racing team-mate Josef Newgarden in a memorable 1-2 for the underdog outfit, but that only tells part of the story of a race he feels unlucky not to have won.
Filippi is certainly well-qualified to pass judgement on street tracks given the various venues he’s competed at in an international career that featured trips to Monaco, Valencia and Singapore while on the Formula 1 undercard. The 38-year-old raced on the famously bumpy streets of Baltimore, as well as at Houston, St. Petersburg and Long Beach in IndyCar, while a season of Formula E in 2017-18 took in trips to Hong Kong, Marrakech, Santiago, Punta del Este, Rome, Paris, Zurich and New York. Then there’s the inner-city Copenhagen track and classic Pau circuit he sampled during his tenure in the FIA ETCR electric tin-top series.
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Filippi acknowledges that Spa is “above them all” in a ranking of the best driving challenges and reckons “anybody who has driven” there would agree that “there is nothing else as good as that”. Similar such tracks that evolved out of public roads he believes “have generally a better feel for the driver because it’s more of a natural elevation change rather than being artificially designed on a field”. That’s certainly not an accusation that can be levied at the 1.786-mile track that weaves through the lakeside streets of Canada’s largest city.
“Toronto you literally race the streets,” he says. “When you have street courses where you really follow the streets, they are the best. And Toronto is really nice because also being near the coast of [Lake] Ontario, the configuration of the road and of the corners is not the typical American configuration which is 90-degrees all the time, so it has more of a natural flow.
“You have proper kerbs, some higher than others, and some roughness and bumpiness that you find in [North] American circuits, but a decent amount which is still fun to drive. Also you have a little bit of elevation change like Turn 1, it’s braking a little bit downhill and then it’s off-camber. At the end of the back straight which is quite long, it goes up again, so this is quite nice in a street course.
“When I arrived there it was really difficult to start with because it’s a really complicated circuit but then I raced the rhythm and when it got to qualifying time I was up there. It’s one of those places that it clicked.
Source: Autosport