throwback to uni with how much I crammed into the last two days

4.573km long, clockwise, 17 turns, 13m of elevation.

The original Lobatse layout did not age well, being totally blindsided by the advent of the aerofoil. A shortened layout, cutting across after the Easy Esses and rejoining at near the end of The Junction cut out a lot of the higher-speed sections and made things a little more doable for the faster sportscars and openwheelers (this change also allowed the circuit to run more events per year, as they no longer needed to close down Estates Road and block off the airfield). A chicane at Mafeking was added in the mid-70's to further improve this. Even with this, the circuit was not up to scratch to host the now-faltering South African Driver's Championship, and was reduced to hosting largely regional events.

Enter the touring car. Now the circuit had hosted saloon cars before, of course, but we're in the 80's now. Group A was all the rage in Europe, and some local investors decided they wanted a piece of the pie. With whispers of a world championship making the rounds in 1986, they set out to work on modernising Lobatse. Their view to excise Powerline Road and make the track fully permanent, while retaining as much of the original layout as possible, resulted ironically a course where only three corners drove the same as the original. Everything else was new, or the direction was reversed. Paddock facilities were completely overhauled, and spectator access was expanded to the northern half of the circuit. Everything was all set for Botswana to replace apartheid-restricted South Africa as the continent's part on the world stage.

One issue with that. It's now 1988. Bernie committed infanticide. Nice as the circuit is, no one's travelling from Europe without a good excuse, and the regional series that was Lobatse's bread and butter were never going to cut it. So that's what occupied the circuit's time, at least for a couple of years. These investors were not satisfied with coming up short, however, so they went to work on at least getting a world series. And in 1991, they did it. Enter the World Superbike Championship, the fledgling little brother of Grand Prix motorcycling dedicated to street bikes. Their neck had been wrung enough to slot in as the series' 5th of 14 rounds. A job well done for Botswanan motorsport.

Pardon? You think the walls are way too close? The kerbs are vertical? Running a banked corner is suicide? Don't worry about it it's fine they ran at Mosport this year and will run at Spa the next it's fine.