The 5 Longest Circuits on the Calendar

What are the five longest circuits on the 2013 calendar? Or even the five longest of all time? The Nürburgring Nordschleife in the early days? No actually.

First I’ll start with the longest in the 2013 calendar, from 5th and moving up. The fifth longest circuit is the Korea International Circuit, 5.615km long with 18 corners, not a very exciting circuit. Number four is exciting, and has a lot of history. The Autodromo Nazionale Monza, 5.793km long and the most used circuit of all time, raced at in 62 of the 63 F1 seasons, missing out in 1980 while it was being refurbished. Suzuka is the third longest but not even 20m longer than Monza, it is 5.807km long, the race there has been won 7 times by both McLaren and Ferrari.

Getting near the end now, fairly obvious what the longest is, but number two? Silverstone, 5.901km with its current layout. Much like Suzuka, Silverstone has also been won an equal amount of times by McLaren and Ferrari, 12 each. Now the inevitable, the longest circuit on the 2013 calendar, Spa-Francorchamps, 7.004km long but still some way short of the original 14.1km layout.

Now to move on to the longest of all time, number five has only been raced at once, Sebring in 1959, with the original 8.356km layout, won by Bruce McLaren in a Cooper, his first win and happened on the 12th of December. Number four is Monza again, this time the 10km oval layout, used only a few times in the 50s and 60s. The original Spa-Francorchamps layout is number three, 14.120km long, the lap record was set in 1970 by Chris Amon with an average speed of 245kph.

The Nürburgring Nordschleife is number two, 22.835km long, raced at 22 times, lots of 2s but only 14 laps long at the last race in 1976. The longest ever circuit used was raced at just once, much like Sebring, the 25.579km long Pescara Circuit raced at in 1957. The fastest lap around the Pescara Circuit took a whopping 9 minutes and 44 seconds and the 18 lap race took almost 3 hours.