Madring’s Missed Apex: A Critical Look at F1’s Newest Circuit

The cars had barely turned a wheel in anger before the verdict started to form in the paddock. By Sunday night in Madrid, it was unanimous: the new Madring layout might be one of the worst tracks on the calendar for actual racing.

Drivers had warned everyone days in advance. Overtaking would be “next to impossible,” they said. They were right.

This was not some legacy street circuit boxed in by city planners and 1970s concrete. Half of Madring is purpose-built, the rest wrapped around the Ifema exhibition centre near Barajas airport. A rare clean sheet. A chance to design a modern Grand Prix circuit with racing at its core.

Instead, F1 ended up with a layout that left even the drivers baffled.

Lando Norris summed up the mood with a single, cutting line: “I don't know how someone looks at this design and goes: ‘Mint.’”

A Track That Forgot How Racing Works

The central problem is brutally simple. There is no proper long straight feeding into a big braking zone. No natural launchpad for a lunge. No obvious place for a driver to throw the car down the inside and make it stick.

That flaw bleeds into everything else.

Many corners at Madring demand braking and turning at the same time. That might be fun in a qualifying lap, but in race trim it kills wheel-to-wheel combat. A driver attacking under braking needs a stable car, a clear line, and confidence the rival alongside has somewhere to go. Here, the combination entries make that almost impossible.

Then there are the walls. On corner exits they seem to lean back towards the racing line, tightening the space just when a driver might be trying to hang on around the outside or complete a move. It looks dramatic on TV. It does nothing for racing.

And looming over all of it is the pit lane. Or more accurately, the marathon that passes for one.

Madring’s pit lane is the longest on the calendar. That matters. The longer the pit lane, the greater the time loss for a stop. The greater the time loss, the more teams are pushed towards a single-stop strategy. Combine that with high tyre degradation and you get drivers nursing rubber, driving well under the limit, desperate to avoid an extra stop.

Less pushing. Fewer mistakes. Fewer incidents. Fewer safety cars. Less chaos. Less racing.

For a brand-new venue, it is a remarkable misread of what modern F1 needs.

The Fix Is Sitting in Plain Sight

The irony is that the drivers do not hate driving the place. Quite the opposite. On low fuel, new tyres and a clear track, Madring is a blast.

“To me, it's not a great race track. It's great in qualifying,” Norris said. That distinction matters. A thrilling qualifying lap does not automatically translate into a compelling Grand Prix.

Norris, though, did more than complain. He offered a blueprint.

He wants Turns 18 and 19 gone. Erased. In their place, a straight shot from Turn 17 to Turn 20, feeding into a wide, aggressive braking zone – “a much wider entry like Austin Turn One or Turn 10 in Austin... big hairpin,” as he described it.

That kind of corner is gold dust in F1. A long straight, a heavy stop, a wide entry that invites multiple lines. It encourages late braking, switchbacks, and drivers committing to moves from way back. Norris believes that alone would “create much better opportunities for everyone and you'll be able to enjoy the race.”

He did not stop there. He also pointed at what he called “some trickier changes” – notably the awkward chicane at Turn 5 and the section from there to Turn 7. That part of the lap breaks up rhythm and flow without offering anything in return in terms of racing.

All of this is fixable. The track is new. The investment is fresh. There is no sacred history to protect. If ever a venue was ripe for rapid evolution, it is this one.

A Paddock Split in Two

The problems do not end at the white lines.

Madring’s pits and paddock are spread across a fractured, sprawling footprint, sliced up by the exhibition halls of Ifema. For teams, media and officials, it felt less like a Grand Prix hub and more like trying to run a world championship round in the middle of a trade show.

The site itself is functional rather than glamorous – “a bit like holding a grand prix at the NEC in Birmingham,” as one description had it – and that makes the job harder, not easier. The current pit lane is literally split in half by a building. The paddock is scattered over a large area, making logistics and day-to-day work unnecessarily complicated.

Here too, the solution is obvious: find a way to position the pit lane so it is continuous, not broken up by architecture, and pull the pits and paddock together into a single, coherent, outdoor space. That would help operations and open up more freedom to adjust the pit entry and exit, which in turn could ease the way to a shorter, less punishing pit lane.

None of this requires reinventing the wheel. It just needs the organisers to listen to the people trying to race there.

The clock is already ticking. Madrid is on the calendar for years to come. The question is whether the next version of Madring looks like a circuit built for show cars and photo ops, or one rebuilt to let the fastest drivers in the world actually race.