‘Less margin than Monaco’ - First impressions of F1’s hybrid Madrid street track

Formula 1 drivers got their first taste driving the new Madrid circuit during Friday practice at the Spanish Grand Prix. 

The newly-built Madring hosts its first ever grand prix this weekend and promised to pose a huge challenge to the drivers with a combination of high-speed corners, unforgiving walls and curved braking zones. 

A recent Formula 3 test highlighted just how tricky the track is with 19 flags featuring across two days of running at the Spanish venue. 

F1 drivers completed two hours of running around the street circuit during Friday practice, enabling some clear first impressions to be drawn…

More risky than Monaco? 

George Russell, who set the pace in F1’s first practice session in Madrid, was quick to point out that the circuit has virtually no margin for error. 

The 28-year-old Briton even went as far as to say it has less than Monaco due to the increased speeds. 

“I would put this as a circuit that has less margin, purely because of the speed,” Russell told media in Madrid. 

“In Monaco the walls are closer but because you’re going slower - if you make a mistake you’re not into the wall as quickly, and you can recover it sometimes. It’s more lock-up. Here, there’s less margin.

"There's a lot of really fast corners, but the barrier is kind of like coming back onto the track. So, if you are to go wide and hit the wall, you're not hitting it kind of at the same angle as the car is going. The wall is sort of coming in at you.”

La Monumental is a spectacular problem corner 

Madring has drawn some early comparisons to other F1 street circuits such as Jeddah, Baku, Miami and Sochi.

The most striking corner on the track is undoubtedly the impressive 24-degree, 500-metre long banked Turn 12, named La Monumental. 

Drivers spend around six seconds navigating this iconic section of the circuit and from the early running on Friday, it is clear this is going to be one of the biggest problem corners. 

Traffic proved to be a particular issue through the blind corner, with drivers almost tripping up over one another on several occasions throughout the two practice sessions. 

Carlos Sainz had a near-miss with Lewis Hamilton in FP1, while Fernando Alonso was left frustrated after catching a slow-moving Cadillac during one of his laps in FP2. 

Turns five, seven and 17 are the notable hotspots singled out by drivers. Turn 17 was something of an Achilles’ heel for Ferrari, with both seven-time world champion Hamilton and Charles Leclerc having several wide moments as they narrowly avoided the barriers. 

“It’s a massively challenging circuit,” Hamilton said. “Of all the new tracks I’ve gone to, this one, maybe Saudi, are the two closest in terms of how difficult it was to get on top of the car and find the right lines.”

Teams facing set-up headaches 

The unique hybrid nature of the circuit, which combines public roads with purpose-built sections, is also giving teams headaches when it comes to car set-up. 

Balance compromises are needed to meet the demands of the track, which will result in something of a set-up trade-off and some sacrifices being made. 

“It’s a challenge,” Aston Martin chief trackside officer Mike Krack said. “It is a very big compromise between all these high-speed sections, the softness required, the stiffness required for the banking, the softness required for the kerbs.

“I think it is trying to optimise what can you sacrifice here to gain somewhere else. I think with now some data under our belt, there’s more to optimise. 

“Obviously, every team has a simulator where I think the lights will not go out tonight. So I think every team will move in the same direction, with the grip improving and getting to know the track better.”

Is Madring a ‘car killer’? 

Williams team principal James Vowles made headlines leading into the weekend when he labelled Madrid as a “car killer”, with several drivers expecting a disrupted weekend full of red flags and potential chaos. 

But it was a fairly calm start to proceedings on Friday, with only five red flags appearing throughout a total of six track sessions across F1 and its feeder series Formula 2 and F3. 

The most dramatic incident occurred in F2 practice when Tasanapol Inthraphuvasak had to make a speedy exit from his car after it burst into flames when he smashed into the wall at Turn 19. 

F1’s drivers behaved themselves in a remarkably uneventful FP1, before Arvid Lindblad caused the first red flag in a grand prix session in Madrid when the 19-year-old rookie lost control of his Racing Bulls at Turn 13 and slid sideways into the wall. 

The impact caused significant damage to Lindblad's front and rear suspension, as well as breaking his front wing. It served as a clear demonstration that the Madring bites hard, and a small accident at such high speeds are unlikely. 

Overtaking will be tough 

One early conclusion is that overtaking will be particularly difficult, something that many drivers raised concerns about before the track action even began. 

"I wish they did something a bit different with the braking zones and not having them too much angled," Williams driver Alex Albon pointed out. 

”You've got a lot of combined corners, which just thinking of overtaking on Sunday, it feels like it's quite easy to defend. You just put the car in the middle of the track and you're not going to get a car that's going to go past you.

"That just means that it will be more of a [battery] deployment overtake than a braking overtake. But yeah, it will be challenging.”

At the end of Friday’s running, Russell simply stated that overtaking will be “very tough”. 

Limited overtaking opportunities will only place greater emphasis on the importance of nailing a lap in qualifying to secure a good starting position for Sunday’s grand prix. 

"Qualifying is for sure going to be the key of the weekend," Leclerc said at the end of Friday. "Particularly in FP2 I tried to overtake and even with a large pace delta it was extremely difficult or impossible to overtake."