Last December’s first-ever Saudi Arabian Grand Prix was for a variety of reasons — , ill-conceived race craft and red flag-provoking crashes chief among them. But human error aside, the Jeddah Corniche Circuit was clearly not an environment suitable for clean, competitive, consistent racing. The FIA has made some alterations to the track to fix that ahead of Formula 1's return there this weekend.

The track’s narrow, tight nature, with barriers right up to the edge of the course in many places, ruined drivers’ sight lines and left zero margin for error. That made incidents more likely and, when they inevitably happened, they jammed up the entire road and necessitated emergency barrier repairs, stopping the action.

On Friday, F1 goes back to Jeddah. Last year it was the second-to-last race on the calendar; in 2022, it’s the second. The circuit was mere days before F1's arrival, which likely explains many of the issues with its construction. The FIA has taken the interim since the first running to make a number of changes, per :

In the tight Turn 2-3 complex where a crash in the race led to one of two red flags last year, the barriers on the left-hand side of the track have been moved back, improving visibility.

A similar move has been taken at Turns 14 and 21 to try and make the sightlines better for drivers coming through the kinks at high-speed, while a smooth face has been added to some of the barriers, allowing drivers to brush up against them more.

Wittich’s notes also confirmed the track had been widened to 12m at the final corner, up from 10.5m last year.

Jeddah is a remarkably fast track, consisting primarily of high-speed, flat-out squiggly not-quite-straights leading into only a few obvious overtaking zones. Last year, Grand Prix Drivers’ Association director George Russell, now with Mercedes but driving for Williams at the time, on how the street circuit’s incessant kinks impeded vision and, consequently, safety as a whole:

“So, a lot to learn I think for motorsport this weekend, because it’s an incredibly exhilarating and exciting track to drive but it’s lacking a lot from a safety perspective and a racing perspective.

“And there are unnecessary incidents waiting to happen in all of these small kinks that are blind, which are not even corners in an F1 car, but they just offer unnecessary danger.”

“Lacking from a safety and a racing perspective” — that’s basically all the perspectives! Russell himself was coming out of Turn 2 on a restart on lap 15, when Sergio Perez and Charles Leclerc collided ahead of him. The Williams driver slowed up in a futile attempt to avoid the crash and was punted by Nikita Mazepin. The net result of all of this was the second red flag of the race — just 15 laps into a 50-lap contest.

It’s clear the FIA has work to do to make the Saudi Arabian venue a safer one for racing, especially given that the new era of F1 cars are engineered to run nearer together without losing quite as much speed as before. Close-pack competition on a tight, twisty yet high-speed street circuit is a recipe for disaster; we’ll just have to see if the nips and tucks to the course can mitigate that danger.