Engineering China's enhanced road safety

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 about 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 in which it had long trailed.

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