The father-and-son team pushing boundaries with F1's newest locations

Carsten Tilke grabs a piece of Las Vegas from the shelf. It’s one part of a model of the forthcoming track in the world’s gambling capital.

“You see the Bellagio?” he asks, drawing GP Racing’s attention to the miniature of one of the world’s most famous hotels, along with its 8.5-acre man-made lake and the fountains that dance to music every 15 minutes during the evening. “Here it is. And the fountains.”

The 3D printer, housed in one of the rooms of the Tilke Engineers & Architects building in Aachen, is yet to produce the rest of the circuit mock-up. It’s a busy piece of equipment: models that emanated from it adorn much of the three-storey office of the company, located in one of the alleyways next to Krefelder Strasse on the outskirts of town, near New Tivoli Stadium, where the local football club Alemannia
 plays its matches. Next to the chunk of Nevada on the shelf are details of various other Tilke projects – mostly the recent ones.

“This is Jeddah - see, the last corner,” says Tilke Jr, grabbing another square object from the shelf.

“The media island is here,” smiles Tilke Sr, indicating the state-of-the-art edifice, a small part of the substantial infrastructure project involved in staging the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix.

Getting on Ecclestone’s radar

Hermann Tilke’s company now employs 150 people, mostly designers and engineers. He founded it back in 1983, having just finished university. Six months as an office-based engineer left Hermann feeling he wasn’t getting enough time for his hobbies – Tilke raced in various GT championships – and he quit, instead setting up shop in his own kitchen.

Tilke's work on the Mercedes grandstand at the Nurburgring brought him to Ecclestone's attention

Photo by: Motorsport Images

The hobby would lay the foundation for a successful career. Hermann raced a lot at the Nurburgring and offered his services to the track.

“I knew they needed to do some things, so I just went to the management there 
and said, ‘Hey, I’m here, I can do this,’” he explains. “First they were sceptical,
 but then gave me the job.”

First, a 600 Deutsche Mark gig 
to refurbish a small safety road.
 A few more projects after that, pitwall reconstruction among them. And then, finally, a massive commission to put together the 
new Mercedes-Benz grandstand. That one would facilitate a 
meeting which changed his life.

"In Bahrain, everything was scheduled for 1 October. And then Bernie called me and asked, ‘Is it possible to have it ready by April?’ I said, ‘I don’t know, I’ll come back to you tomorrow.’ And next day I read in the newspaper the April date was confirmed. So we had to live with it" Hermann Tilke

“That was how Bernie [Ecclestone] found out about me,” recalls Hermann of his introduction to Formula 1’s legendary ‘ringmaster’. “He saw the grandstand and asked, ‘Who’s done this?’ and they said it was somebody from here. So he wanted to speak to me. And I was there
 too, but on a grandstand. They called me and said, ‘You have to come’, and it was the first time 
I got into an F1 paddock.”

The rise was meteoric. Soon Ecclestone put Tilke in touch with people from the Malaysian government, and in 1999 F1 arrived at Sepang – an autodrome that became a calling card for Tilke and effectively made him F1’s go-to track designer. From that moment on, any entity who wanted to have a new F1 track built was directed towards the designer from Aachen.

The tracks in Bahrain and China arrived on the calendar in 2004. Ecclestone appreciated that Tilke could be tasked with a project of any difficulty level. In Shanghai, Hermann built a track around swampy ground, in Bahrain he did so in the desert, in record time.

“In Bahrain, everything was scheduled for 1 October,” he recalls. “And then Bernie called me and asked, ‘Is it possible to have it ready by April?’ I said, ‘I don’t know, I’ll come back to you tomorrow.’ And next day I read in the newspaper the April date was confirmed. So we had to live with it. It was also very tight, this project, but in 14 months we managed to build everything.”

Tilke was commissioned for time-sensitive jobs on difficult terrain, such as swampland in Shanghai

Photo by: Sutton Images

Next up were projects in Istanbul, Singapore, Valencia and Abu Dhabi. It was during the time Tilke worked on the latter that his company grew to 200 staffers, because of the sheer size of the project.

But Tilke isn’t limited to just F1. His company’s projects include hotels, residential areas and shopping malls. Yet auto racing and anything to do with the automotive industry are still the main focus.

“Lot of tracks we’re doing, people don’t really know about,” says Carsten Tilke, “because it’s club tracks or tracks for the automotive industry. We’re doing a lot of testing tracks, Porsche experience centres as well. We did seven out of the nine Porsche experience centres. Not only in Germany, but also the one in Japan at the moment, for example.”

Running in the family

Carsten joined his father’s company eight years ago. When Hermann was establishing himself as F1’s foremost circuit specialist, Carsten was still a teenager.

“I was with Hermann a lot of times at different racetracks, also because he was racing himself,” he says. “We had a small flat rented at the Nurburgring. So I spent some weekends there as he was racing. I could always bring a friend. A lot of times we came to see him racing, but they usually retired after a few laps! Anyway, it was fun.”

Naturally, motorsport became Carsten’s passion as well. But his father was initially reluctant for
 him to join the family firm.

“He started racing himself,” says Hermann, “and he wanted to do this [design tracks] as well.
 I said, ‘Please, think about it, maybe it’s better to be a lawyer or a doctor or whatever,’ but he still chose this. After studying in Munich, he finished his PhD, became a doctor, and a few years later he joined us. First he was sitting downstairs, with the engineers. Now he’s a partner.”

The first F1 undertaking Carsten worked on with his father was the street circuit in Baku – and it proved a challenge.

Tilke works on a variety of projects outside racing tracks, including automotive test centres

Photo by: Evgeny Safronov

“We had different possibilities,” says Hermann. “And most of them were very boring. They were in a different part of the city. The paddock would have been the same, but the track would go to the other side. And it would have been easy to do it there. But boring.”

“Yeah, 90-degree corners only, not so nice buildings anymore, mostly skyscrapers,” says Carsten. “So, for the city, for the country to show itself, it wouldn’t be that good. But we had this other project, the difficult one. So in the end we sat together and they just said to us, ‘What should we go for? You tell us,’ And we said, ‘We need to fight for the difficult one.’

“There was an easy route to say ‘Let’s do it like this’ in the other
 part of the city. We would have saved ourselves a lot of headaches, a lot more effort, but we just had
 to do it, because we wanted to create something cool.

"She said, ‘No way, cobblestones must remain there.’ And I had to convince her that we’d find the way to put the asphalt on top for the race and then remove it without any damage" Hermann Tilke

“I remember when we walked the future track together with [former FIA race director] Charlie Whiting. First he said, ‘Urgh, this is crazy, we can’t,’ and then, ‘but we have to.’”

Hermann adds: “Also people in the office, when we came back with some photos and everything... We showed it all to our engineers, and they said ‘Ooofff, it’s not possible.’”

“I was there two times at night, three or four o’clock when we closed the roads and placed cones there,” continues Carsten. “Turn 15, the one where a lot of drivers now do mistakes and go straight, was the most difficult, because the run-off was only possible in one direction: we have the building there, which cannot be shifted. So we had to close the streets there during the night to figure out, with cones, the best way to shape the corner. We thought about making a chicane, but it was simply too narrow.

“There were a lot of challenges... And Hermann had to speak to the wife of the Azerbaijan president  about cobblestones in the old town.”

Tilke Sr smiles at the memory: “Yes, she was involved too. She said, ‘No way, cobblestones must remain there.’ And I had to convince her that we’d find the way to put the asphalt on top for the race and then remove it without any damage. First she said, ‘I don’t believe you,’ but agreed in the end.”

Squeezing a Formula 1 track around Baku old town was a considerable challenge for the Tilkes

Photo by: Red Bull Content Pool

Answering the critics

A high profile can also make you a target. When F1 takes heat for boring races and a lack of overtaking, Tilke’s is usually among the first names on the blame list. It’s often said his tracks insufficiently challenge the drivers, offer few overtaking opportunities, or that their layouts are too generic.

“Yeah, criticism, when you read it, sometimes it can be a little bit painful,” says Hermann. “Sometimes it’s right. But most of the time we have some borders we cannot cross: if you have this land, you can only use this land. But what I will never agree is that all our tracks are the same. That’s simply not true. The only thing they all have in common is a long straight. But that’s it.”

He offers up the new Jeddah street circuit as an example of a venue that is nothing if not difficult for drivers.

“You can say it’s an answer to 
all the critics who say the new tracks are boring and not challenging,” Hermann says.
“This is a really challenging track. And the drivers... I saw [Charles] Leclerc last year, when he got out
 of the car. He sat on the tyre, he
 was totally exhausted.”

Certainly nobody disputes the challenge of the Jeddah track in particular, but that venue has also proved to be an incident magnet – some of them frightening – and the drivers have been vocal about safety issues such as inadequate sightlines in quick sections. Entering an area ‘blind’ at high speed can exacerbate even minor incidents, such as when one car spins and another arrives on the scene unaware. Tilke continues to work with the FIA to satisfy the drivers’ demands, prioritising the highest-speed sections of this rollercoaster track, moving walls away from the racing line.

“I think, the layout itself is fast and really demanding,” says Carsten. “Also the drivers, as far as we’ve spoken with them, they like the layout itself. It’s cool, it’s fun. But of course, we’re now getting the feedback and we’re improving it, from year to year, to have better visibility, because of course it shouldn’t be dangerous.

“But we try to keep the layout as much as possible. It produces cool races, it’s fun for the drivers. But it’s also difficult, because we just had this small strip of the land, so everything had to be very compact.

“It was approved by the FIA to have it like this. But, after every race, you get smarter. It’s important to get feedback and to react on this feedback. So for us it wasn’t that we said, ‘Oh, we did a mistake.’ It was more like, ‘OK, we did it and everyone was fine with it. But now we know more and we’ll try in this direction to make it better.’ And this is a normal process.”

Although large runoffs as seen at Abu Dhabi are increasingly common, Tilke bristles at suggestions his tracks are alike

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

Another sore subject for Tilke is that of track limits. As the years have passed, Tilke projects have featured fewer and fewer gravel traps – but it’s not because the company has an asphalt run-off fetish. There are powerful business arguments for getting rid of gravel traps, and not just the angle pushed by Ecclestone, who felt that by eliminating cars from the running in a grand prix they potentially diminished the overall show.

Most tracks have to run as businesses, which means laying on events for other days in the year when the grand prix circus isn’t in town. So, while you could argue that asphalt run-offs have had the unintended consequence of encouraging F1 drivers to take liberties with track limits – because there’s no gravel to get stuck in – there is a net benefit to tracks’ overall business.

“To have gravel next to the track is totally nice for F1, because we all agree it’s nice when you don’t have track limits and mistakes are punished,” says Carsten. “But you have a lot of private drivers and clubs coming [on trackdays], and people driving their Ferraris or Lamborghinis or whatever. And for them it’s a nightmare, because if stones get on the track, they need to clean it. Otherwise cars get damaged. And if a car gets in the gravel, they have to throw a red flag, reducing the track time for the other people there...”

"We need to make as little disturbance as possible for the casinos, for the restaurants, for shops. We need to organise ourselves very well in terms of set-up time, in terms of making everything go smoothly. And this is the biggest challenge in Vegas" Carsten Tilke

Tilke Sr rises and makes his way towards a map of a current F1 track that shall remain unnamed.

“Here,” he points to one of the run-off areas. “This is asphalt, and FIA doesn’t want it, they want to have gravel. But the client says, ‘No, no, no, we have normal drivers, a lot of trackdays, and they are destroying their cars. We have to keep it like this.’ And I can understand them.

“The modern cars, street cars, some of them you throw it in the gravel and you have a repair invoice for five, six, eight thousand.”

What happens in Vegas…

Tilke’s next big challenge is the Las Vegas street circuit, set to host the penultimate round of the F1 season in November 2023. Some of his employees are already in permanent presence at the location, while Carsten flies to Nevada every three-to-four weeks to monitor progress.

Working on the layout for the 2023 Las Vegas Grand Prix is Tilke's next big project

Photo by: Evgeny Safronov

“From the beginning of next year, it will start to be very interesting,” he says. The Tilkes will need 
every ounce of their experience 
to pull this one off.

“Street tracks are always difficult,” says Hermann. “There are a lot of things to think about. First of all, very important is that people should be able to access their houses, so you can’t just close their part of the city. Then you always need a vehicle bridge to the inside part, because there could be an emergency. If someone needs an ambulance it needs to be able to get there without stopping the race.”

It’s a trial on a completely new level. With the Vegas GP, F1’s goal is not just to put on a show, but to become ingrained in Vegas’s everyday hustle and bustle. It has to coexist with a 24-hour money-making machine whose operators want the event to complement rather than detract from the cash being poured into slot machines or pushed across green baize.

“In Las Vegas, we have the biggest hotels of the world in the middle of the circuit,” says Carsten. “The Venetian, with over 6000 beds. And next to it is the fourth biggest hotel. We have so many hotel rooms inside the circuit and around it, plus one of the liveliest streets in the world, the Las Vegas Boulevard...

“We need to make as little disturbance as possible for the casinos, for the restaurants, for shops. We need to organise ourselves very well in terms of set-up time, in terms of making everything go smoothly. And this is the biggest challenge in Vegas.

“We have less time to do everything than we normally 
have. And everything needs to
 work all the time. People need to feel not compromised by the race. It’s an addition for them, it’s an additional huge show.

“I think everyone would love to be there. So many people 
already calling me, every week, asking if I can organise some hotel rooms there. Because everyone wants to be there. But we have to make sure everything goes smoothly and nobody later complains too much, ‘Oh, I couldn’t go there because everything was closed.’ And this 
is a huge challenge.”

There probably will be those who’ll still find cause for complaint. But it’s unlikely there’s anyone out there better suited to reconciling the complex demands of the 
Las Vegas stakeholders than the 
father-son duo who persuaded Baku’s leaders it was possible to 
lay temporary asphalt on those historic cobblestones…

The Tilke father and son team have had a huge impact on Formula 1, and their work is ongoing to bring new destinations to life

Photo by: Evgeny Safronov