It’s been over a decade since Christophe Bouchut last raced at his favourite circuit. And while the 1993 Le Mans 24 Hours winner says the 2.258-mile Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course first opened in 1962 is “not the biggest, not the most beautiful circuit,” he reckons the track’s combination of corners, elevation and challenging braking zones means “everything is done for me there”.
“It brings me a lot of pleasure to drive there,” he says. “This is a mix from a normal circuit with a street circuit. If you do a mistake then you go in the wall.
“Many circuits in the USA, if you want to be fast, then you have to accept to take a lot of risk. But I’m more talking about some elevation, some angle of corners, than for this reason [of risk-versus-reward that] I like this circuit.”
Bouchut favours tracks where drivers can attack corner entries, rather than finding that they gain time largely from carrying speed onto straights and only having “to think about all the exit of the corners”. The 13-turn Mid-Ohio track, therefore, is a circuit that favours his style.
“I am a hard braker, I am braking late,” explains Bouchut, also an outright winner of 24-hour races at Daytona (1995) and Spa (2001-02). “And I like to push the car on the limit and to accelerate very early.
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“You can’t do it on many circuits, you need a certain angle of the corner to do it. And Mid-Ohio, it’s possible to be like hell on the corners, no compromise. It’s why I like this.”
Source: Autosport