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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 for 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 accurate to 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.

Dismantling barriers

Motorsport circuit design has long been a male-dominated engineering field. Yao broke into the niche sector with a mission to design world-class race circuits in China, championing domestic expertise for more than two decades in a sector long led by Western engineers.

Her career in circuit engineering began in 2003, when she joined a Shanghai municipal research institute and contributed to the design of supporting facilities for the Shanghai International Circuit, as the city prepared to host the inaugural F1 Chinese Grand Prix in September 2004.

In 2004, she was appointed chief designer for Shanghai's DTM street race, a circuit winding through the financial district around the Oriental Pearl Tower.

During research for her master's degree, Yao published some 10 academic papers on safety barriers.

That expertise helped her master strict regulations set by motorsport's governing body, the International Automobile Federation.

She revised a longstanding FIA safety barrier design, developing a new dual-purpose barrier suitable for both race circuits and urban roads while cutting material costs by a quarter — a feat that earned praise from the governing body.

Fresh off the DTM street-race success, Yao set her sights on a permanent circuit.

It just so happened that the northeastern city of Changchun in Jilin province had plans to build one. She wrote to event organizers and sports bureau officials and expressed her interest in taking on the project. The authorities gave her three months.

Yao locked herself in a 10-square-meter attic in Shanghai. She had no codes, no standards — just an uneven plot of land where the race circuit was to be developed.

She contacted a foreign design agency for assistance, but their responses were blunt: their standards were proprietary, and while they could design the circuit for her, it would come at a cost. At the time, China's circuit-design field was virtually nonexistent, and Yao recognized the country lagged behind Western nations by nearly a century in circuit design, with the latter holding far more case histories and data.

To close the gap, she resolved to pursue technological breakthroughs. "I decided right then, I'm going to do this myself," she said.

Yao, who holds a national-level computer proficiency certificate from her college days, soon realized manual calculations would not keep pace with the design demands.

Drawing on her coding skills, she built a circuit simulation system from scratch — writing programs, running computations and refining the system through countless iterations.

At a later FIA meeting in Paris, international experts unanimously endorsed her design proposal for the Changchun circuit, while expressing surprise at China's rapid advances in a field it had long trailed in.

While the Changchun circuit remains to be built, the project marked China's entry into international circuit design.

Driving innovation

In 2009, at the height of her professional career, Yao made a strategic move, taking a position as a designer at Tongji Architectural Design Group to anchor her work in deeper academic research, and simultaneously pursued a doctoral degree in road safety at Tongji University.

In 2013, she took on the Wuhan International Circuit project, where she introduced a "circuit as a service" design philosophy — applying race circuit-level safety principles to autonomous driving and public roads. That same year, while pregnant, she continued running simulations and refining the design right up until giving birth.

The effort translated into results in 2014, when the circuit's safety simulation data closely aligned with the FIA's parameters, drawing global recognition. The finished, butterfly-shaped circuit also became an integrated venue for both racing and autonomous-vehicle testing, helping bridge circuit technology and everyday road safety.

Over the course of her career, Yao and her team have designed more than 200 motorsport circuits and secured over 40 industry-first achievements for China and the wider motorsport sector.

In recent years, circuit engineering, however, accounts for only a third of her professional work, Yao said.

The bulk of her time is devoted to researching intelligent traffic safety and innovative mobility, repurposing racing circuits as high-standard testbeds for civilian vehicle development.

"Modern race circuits are no longer exclusive to motorsport; they provide critical testing environments for autonomous vehicles operating under the most extreme driving conditions," Yao said.

In 2020, she established the Shanghai Research Center for Smart Mobility and Road Safety, applying race circuit safety technologies to autonomous-driving and public-road applications.

She also invests time in public education, publishing popular books such as The Story of Motor Sports and a karting-themed comic book that have reached millions of young readers. "I have received so much encouragement and praise from society in this era, and I've always thought about how I can give back," she said, adding that she will continue to donate to efforts geared toward road-safety science popularization.

In 2020, Yao was named one of China's model workers.

lilei@chinadaily.com.cn