What makes a good racetrack?

Monaco. Indianapolis. Le Mans. Spa. Daytona.

There are certain racetracks that are so intertwined with the history of racing that they become as legendary as the icons who navigate their corners.

“When you have these old racetracks with a lot of history, then there’s a lot of things that happened in each corner. It makes it unique, it makes it interesting for people,” Hermann Tilke — managing director of Tilke Engineers & Architects, who have designed from scratch or overseen renovations of 17 circuits on the Formula One, NASCAR and MotoGP calendars in 2024 — told ESPN. “Tradition makes heroes; it also makes heroes out of the tracks.”

Because of those traditions, because they’ve been home to so many history-defining moments in motorsport, courses such as Interlagos in Brazil or Assen in the Netherlands have become as celebrated as Fenway Park or Madison Square Garden.

What about the circuits without that lore, though? It’s not often that you hear a quarterback talk excitedly about getting to play at the San Francisco 49ers’ Levi’s Stadium, which opened in 2014, yet racers across disciplines routinely gush about the satisfaction they get from conquering Tilke’s Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas, which opened in 2012.

“I don’t think there’s one specific answer to what makes a track so good,” said Pato O’Ward, the four-time IndyCar race winner for Arrow McLaren and reserve driver for McLaren’s F1 program in 2024. “I think it’s really all about: Does the track suit the race cars that are going on it? Does it suit the motorcycles that are going on it?

“Barber Motorsports Park [Round 3 of this season’s IndyCar championship] truly is a motorcycle track, it’s not a track for cars, but it is very enjoyable for cars and it’s produced some pretty good racing for cars. … If you take a Formula One car around there, I don’t think it’d be very fun just because [an F1] car is more intertwined with bigger tracks. You can’t put a Formula One car on an IndyCar track and expect it to be very good because it’s not going to be.”

This is part of what has made Tilke Engineers & Architects the most ubiquitous name in circuit design today. Of those 17 tracks on the F1, NASCAR and MotoGP calendars this season it has touched, only three appear on two or more of…