It is hoped the changes will provide more opportunities for better racing - the track used until 2001 was notorious for the difficulty of overtaking.

The new layout will turn sharp right at the end of the pit straight and head into three new corners.

One of these will be a version of the famous Karussel corner on the old 14-mile Nordschleife track next door, which held the German Grand Prix until 1976.

The cars will then rejoin the existing layout of the track at the second corner, after which it will be more or less the same.

The new circuit layout can be seen above.

Help on the animated guide

The movie should take no more than 30 seconds to download on a 56k modem.

If you can't see the moving car in the circuit guide banner above then you will need to install the free Macromedia Flash player plug-in. You can download the free Flash 5 player plug-in from www.macromedia.com/software/flashplayer/
(the file is 219k and will take approximately 1 minute to download over a 56k modem)

Click here to go to our help page if you have any questions or problems about using the Flash plug-in.