I spent the last week enjoying effortless 100kph runs down Vulcan. Heading into the weekend, I was asked countless times: What is scarier, Turkey or Vulcan? Here are my thoughts:
Vulcan is scarier; Turkey is much more challenging… in almost every aspect.
Vulcan is characterized by surreal acceleration, forested straights, and Pablos, a 115kph slide into a tight right turn. Turkey is big, open, and equally epic. However, the comparison cannot be made without context. Turkey is a race, Vulcan is not. This affects my opinions for a couple of different reasons, but the main one being, I don’t NEED to turn off my brain for Vulcan. Therefore, the awareness of danger is alive and well. Erzincan, on the other hand, is a race. We go into the weekend knowing we will push past the comfort zone. With this comes a counterintuitive lack of fear. As we say, we chrome our brain, we remove the wrinkles, we accept maximum risk. Regardless, even if it was a race, Vulcan would still provoke fear. The straights are lined with trees, making them feel much faster than the 16kph difference. (Maximum speeds: Vulcan 115kph vs Turkey 109kph. According to my RaceBox) Along with the trees and the acceleration, Vulcan has “the compression” at the end of the straight; right when you hit top speed, you quickly go uphill and over a crest, creating a tricky weight displacement. For some, it caused more speed wobbles, for me, it felt like I was getting pulled off my board right when you need to be setting up for the longest slide. Lastly, maybe I only felt this because I didn’t do a track walk, so I was in all the wrong places, but Vulcan’s pavement is slightly worse in the fastest section. Adding to the speed wobbles and mental battle to stay tucked.
As for Turkey, I find it less scary because of the openness, you see your fate in the distance, you see the crack (corner 7) before it arrives, and the acceleration is not as severe. What Erzincan does have are fast sweepers that you are encouraged to tuck. The conversations I was having at Vulcan around this subject were centered around this challenge, the gripping at speed. While I do agree that gripping at speed is scary, the fact that we tuck corner 5 and corner 8 (the fast left before the pendy, and the fast right after the crack) shows that we are actually quite far from the limit of grip. Therefore, there is more margin of error than it seems.
With all this said, the two are both very intimidating. I would 100% understand if someone had the opposite opinion to mine. However, Vulcan also has a (newish) crack, quite similar to Turkey’s corner 7. If we had to take a qualifying line through Vulcan’s bottom chicane, I don’t think there would be much debate. Luckily, the pressure was off, and Vulcan’s crack and chicane served as a style zone and longest slide zone.
