Engineering China's enhanced road safety

For decades, the rigorous safety engineering behind Formula One, the pinnacle of motorsport, has been a closely guarded secret.

However, pioneering circuit designer Yao Qiming is bringing these elite-level safety standards to China's public roads. Yao, deputy chief engineer at Tongji Architectural Design Group, has spent her 23-year career in the racing industry meticulously translating technology used on the racing circuit to China's own road network.

Her breakthroughs have not only been applied on the circuit but also to autonomous-vehicle testing and smart traffic infrastructure.

That trajectory is rooted in a childhood dream. Before Yao was born, her father survived a serious road accident that left him reliant on medication for years. She said that experience forged a lifelong ambition to mitigate conditions that lead to traffic casualties.

"All my life, I just want to do one thing right: make roads safer," she said.

Commitment to precision

Yao has long distinguished herself in motorsport engineering through an unyielding pursuit of microscopic precision, with her work centered on safely pushing race cars to their mechanical limits.

Every curve, banking angle and gradient on racing circuits is scientifically calibrated to maximize performance while mitigating catastrophic failure at high speeds. "In circuit design, there are numerous details. We must rely on scientific means to try to find the most extreme conditions and every potential accident that might occur," Yao said.

She said racing circuit design demands construction precision to within a single millimeter.

Such accuracy is indispensable in motor racing, where margins are exceptionally thin. The slightest irregularity in track geometry can alter vehicle dynamics, compromise driver control and pose serious safety risks.

Despite there being no universal standards or uniform protocols, racing circuit design integrates more than a dozen technical disciplines, demanding rigorous oversight and meticulous attention to detail.

Colleagues describe Yao as relentlessly precise — she enforces a strict ban on vague terms such as "maybe", "probably" and "approximately" in all technical assessments.