When single-seaters ruled the roost at the Algarve

As Robert Doornbos blasted off the line and cut in front of former Formula 3000 team-mate Vitantonio Liuzzi into Turn 1, he had taken a decisive step towards carving his own little piece of motorsport history.

A veteran of 11 Formula 1 starts for Minardi and Red Bull before heading Stateside to Champ Car, where he won rookie of the year in 2007, Doornbos would become the first driver to win a major international single-seater race at the Algarve International Circuit as A1GP - the so-called World Cup of motorsport for teams competing under a national flag - rolled into town in April 2009.

The new circuit was well-received by the paddock, with Brazil seat-holder Emerson Fittipaldi sufficiently moved to compare it to Interlagos.

"It's the best new track I have seen - I think I should come out of retirement so that I can race here!" the two-time world champion quipped.

Doornbos too is perhaps unsurprisingly a fan. After his Netherlands crew serviced him with a much quicker pitstop than Liuzzi's Italy team, the Dutchman coasted to a 3.6s victory in the 11-lap sprint from Ireland's Adam Carroll. Doornbos had good reason for thinking he could make it a double from pole in race two, only for an electrical fire on the formation lap to end his day prematurely.

Ahead of F1's unexpected first visit to the venue next weekend - a product of the organiser's desire to make up for the shortfall in flyaway races cancelled due to COVID-19 with a host of extra European rounds - Doornbos is expecting good things.

"It's fast, it's flowing, its different height levels with some blind corners and very late braking moments; I was surprised it was not more popular than it has been up until now," he tells Autosport. "I think most series raced there except F1, so I'm very much looking forward to that."

Indeed, it's not only in the ill-fated 'powered by Ferrari' A1GP car in which Doornbos holds an affinity for the Algarve circuit, having finished on the podium there one year later in another bombastic single-seater series, the football-themed Superleague Formula.

In the heavy V12-powered Panoz - quite the departure from the sleek, aero-efficient A1GP machine - he took advantage of a bonkers rolling start on the fully reversed grid ("front row makeweights Celso Miguez and Maria de Villota were swamped in a sometimes six-abreast frenzy into the first corner", noted Autosport) and charged from 13th to third for Corinthians, with a best lap just 1.2s slower than his A1GP best.

So what's it like to drive a highly powered single-seater there?

"The hearbeat goes up again, like it was in Mugello," says Doornbos. "I remember it as quite a physical track, because even though the cars have power-steering, they have obviously a huge amount of grip.

"If your set-up is not quite there or you don't have the stability that will allow you to attack the corner, you'll really struggle and I don't see why an F1 car will be any different" Adam Carroll

"Temperatures will be different than in the summer, but I think the drivers will like it. There's a very good flow to it and that's what they're looking for on a Saturday afternoon, that the heartbeat goes up to 180-plus."

Northern Irishman Carroll took fastest lap in both A1GP races on his way to the 2008-09 title, and recalls a technical circuit that "needed a slightly different set-up compared to what we usually ran that year".

"There's always a few tracks out there that are very specific in set-up and you have to go away a little bit from your normal pace, Portimao was one of them," he says.

Carroll notes that the turns themselves are typically slower and tighter than Mugello - a circuit "you have to really attack all the time" - but reckons "they're both similar in that they're quite different to other tracks".

"Because you have quite fast corner entries, where you're braking and turning, you need a very stable car," he says. "If your set-up is not quite there or you don't have the stability that will allow you to attack the corner, you'll really struggle and I don't see why an F1 car will be any different. There's a lot of blind corners, it has a bit of everything."

Veteran team owner Alan Docking ran cars in A1GP and Superleague at Algarve, winning in the latter with Beijing Guoan's John Martin in 2010. He too likens it to Mugello with its sweeping "medium to high downforce" corners and varied topography.

"It's along similar lines, definitely," he says. "It's a natural circuit, like Brands Hatch - it's undulating and follows the natural contours, blind spots and so forth. Drivers have a lot of work to do at the place, it's a busy track and you don't get a lot of time to relax."

That point was proven by Martin, already struggling with a heavy cold that left him struggling for breath, who was utterly spent after taking third in Superleague's six-car dash-for-the-cash €100,000 super final. Doornbos had started it from pole but, after a poor getaway, spun at Turn 1 and was collected by Tristan Gommendy's Lyon car, while Frederic Vervisch won for Liverpool.

"John more or less collapsed after the event," recalls Docking. "He was completely exhausted and he had to go to the medical centre to be rebooted. He won it and then the lights went out. It was hard work and I'll be interested to see the F1 cars there which will be faster again.

"The biggest issue was the bumps, it compromised things a bit but I don't think that will be an issue anymore. It's a jolly nice place, they did a great job of it."

And the comparisons with Mugello don't stop there, as the long run up to the start-finish line could be a source of flash-points, just as it was in September's Tuscan GP.

When GP2 visited for a stand-alone round to conclude its 2009 season, a safety car returning slowly to the pits combined with a hasty restart from leader Andreas Zuber resulted in the Austrian and six others - Davide Valsecchi, Kamui Kobayashi, Lucas di Grassi, champion Nico Hulkenberg, Pastor Maldonado and Sergio Perez - all being pinged for overtaking the safety car, allowing Super Nova's Luca Filippi to inherit an unlikely win.

Carroll was another to fall foul of a restart incident in that year's A1GP race following a Turn 8 tangle between Liuzzi and Marco Andretti - making one of his rare appearances outside the US - that also embroiled Monaco's Clivio Piccione.

Leader and home hero Filipe Albuquerque bunched the pack, accelerated and then braked to avoid passing the safety car, creating a mess behind him in which Carroll and Germany's Andre Lotterer both passed Martin's Team Australia car.

Carroll had inherited pole after Doornbos' misfortunes but was pinged for a marginal jump start that dropped him back into the pack. The second penalty was only imposed after the race, but he drove furiously to finish on the coat-tails of title rival Neel Jani's Switzerland car before 25s were added to his race time.

"[Turn 14] is long, downhill, off-camber. It just doesn't really get any worse in terms of motor racing because you don't really know what to do. You can't attack it, it's easy to overdrive because of the way it just falls away" Adam Carroll

"I don't really know what happened, I just remember that everybody went and then realised that we couldn't go so it was then more a case of trying to not crash into each other," he says. "I probably remember going to the stewards after more and being told they weren't interested!"

Carroll's drive to second included a number of eye-catching passing moves, with the long blast down to Turn 1 following the sweeping downhill Turn 15 - which Carroll reckons will be "easy flat" for F1 - a particular favourite.

Alex Albon, George Russell, Charles Leclerc, Lance Stroll and Antonio Giovinazzi were all on the FIA F3 grid in 2015, but used a slightly different configuration with a slower entry into a tight chicane, where F1 will use the same layout as A1GP and Superleague that can be deceptively tricky: Doornbos lost out in the opening Superleague race being dive-bombed by Vervisch, allowing Porto's Alvaro Parente to pass both of them on the exit.

"In a big car, it's a quick corner," says Carroll of Turn 1. "That'll be so fast in the F1 cars, your actual braking phase is very short and then you're off the brakes so there's a very quick minimum speed. It's going to be very, very late [braking]. You might get someone stick their nose in a wee bit and realise there isn't really any time to pop up the inside.

"But as long as they're alongside coming to the braking zone, you've got a good chance. On the front straight you've got DRS and that will give them a chance to pretty much have the overtake done by the time they come into the braking zone."

Carroll reckons the key corner will be the exit from the Turn 14 right-hander.

"It's long, downhill, off-camber, it just doesn't really get any worse in terms of motor racing because you don't really know what to do," he says. "You can't attack it, it's easy to overdrive because of the way it just falls away and goes off-camber, so you have to be quite patient.

"As long as you get that one right and come off with a good exit, then it will give the guys a good chance to go through the last corner right behind them. Then they'll pick up the DRS anyway and you'll probably have a chance of overtaking into Turn 1."

Still, the final 'corner' can be deceptive for the unwary, with the hapless Miguez giving Yelmer Buurman the fright of his life in 2010 when the Bordeaux driver spun across the bows of Buurman's AC Milan machine and forced the Dutchman to take evasive action through the gravel.

"The front-end gets very light, it doesn't turn that easily compared to when you're driving into a banking," says Doornbos. "For sure it's easy-flat, but it's bumpy and it's quite understeery."

As for the rest of the lap, Doornbos identifies only one other realistic passing spot into the left-hand Turn 5 hairpin.

"When you go up the hill (through Turn 4) there's another hairpin braking down the hill and I think that's a good moment to dive in there, because it's quite wide," he says. "The third sector is too technical, twisty, you really have to position your car well to get a flow, to get a momentum."

Carroll says: "The minimum speeds are actually very similar throughout the whole track. It's all second or third gear for most of the corners, so whenever the guys look at the data, they'll pretty much be nearly the same speed at each corner, but the entry is fast so it's not that easy to go up the inside of someone.

"That's where the technique of entering the corner with a really fast entry is important. The guys will enjoy it, I think it's going to be slightly different than anything they've been used to."

And that can surely only be a good thing.