Formula 1 arrives in Madrid this week with no data. The Madring has never held a Grand Prix, nobody has tested there, and the circuit contains a corner that Pirelli says will put more vertical load through a tyre than anything else on the 2026 calendar.
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A 550 metre corner banked at 24 per cent
The Madring is 5.416 km long with 22 corners, built around the IFEMA exhibition district, and it is round 14 of 23 this season. The first and last sectors run on public roads and feel like a street circuit. The middle sector is where the character is, and Turn 12 is why.
La Monumental is a single corner 550 metres long, banked at 24 per cent, which works out at 13.5 degrees. Pirelli says it produces the highest vertical load of the season, not only because of the banking but because of how long the car stays in it. Drivers will take it differently depending on how much they want to set up the following corner, so it is a corner with a choice in it rather than one line.
The rest reads like three circuits stitched together. Sector one is very fast. The start line and Turn 1 are only 200 metres apart. The last part of the lap is a run of 90 degree corners that Pirelli compares to Baku. There is 26 metres of elevation change between the lowest point at Turn 2 and the highest at Turn 7, which sits around 700 metres above sea level, with an 8 per cent climb leading up to it.
Pirelli started work three years before the first lap
The preparation for a circuit nobody has driven began in 2023. Pirelli was given the layout by the designers and used simulation to work out the lines cars would take and, from those, the loads the tyres would see. Once the track was finished, engineers went to Madrid to measure the macro and micro roughness of the asphalt, refine the simulations and produce a briefing document that was shared with every team.
Two findings from that work stand out. The Madring is among the five most energy demanding circuits of the year, with lateral forces comparable to Barcelona and Silverstone. And the asphalt is very smooth, which means low grip, so it has been treated with high pressure water jets to strip the dust and oily residue that new surfaces carry. Singapore gets the same treatment.
C2, C3 and C4, with nothing to spend them on yet
Pirelli brings the C2 as hard, the C3 as medium and the C4 as soft. What nobody knows is how they will behave, because there is no test data from the circuit at all.
That makes Friday unusually important. Teams will not commit to a programme for the weekend until they have run in first practice, and Pirelli notes that if the softer compounds degrade badly, teams may start hoarding hard sets for Sunday before qualifying has even happened. Temperature should not be the complication. Ambient highs in the same week last year reached 29C, and the altitude means nothing extreme is expected.
Gasly arrives on a high, Audi wants to close Europe well
Alpine come to Madrid off the best Saturday of their season. “I think the past week will stick with me for a very long time,” Pierre Gasly said of his Monza pole. “The real high was taking pole position on Saturday and then converting that into really solid points for the team on Sunday.” He and Franco Colapinto have both run the Madring on the simulator at Enstone, and Colapinto has a personal connection: he used to live in Madrid.
For Audi this is the second half of a back to back and the last European race of their first season. Racing director Allan McNish framed it as an execution problem. “There is always an added element of the unknown when we arrive at a circuit for the first time,” he said. “It means we will need to be effective in every practice session.” Nico Hulkenberg made the same point from the cockpit: “Nobody really knows what to expect until the cars hit the track, so it’s one of those weekends where you have to learn and adapt very quickly.”
Madrid last held a Grand Prix in 1981
This is not the city’s first Formula 1 race, though it is the first in 45 years. Jarama, 30 kilometres outside Madrid, held nine editions of the Spanish Grand Prix between 1968 and 1981. Mario Andretti won there twice, more than anyone else, and Lotus took four wins as a constructor.
Across all five circuits that have hosted it, the Spanish Grand Prix has been run 55 times. Michael Schumacher and Lewis Hamilton share the record with six wins each, and Ferrari lead the constructors with twelve.
There is a title on the line in the support paddock too. Formula 3 closes its season at the Madring, with an expanded finale, and Freddie Slater arrives leading the championship by 15 points with three races to run.
Our view: Friday morning matters more than usual
A new circuit flattens the field in one specific way. The reference data that separates a well drilled team from a scrappy one does not exist yet, so the advantage goes to whoever reads the track fastest on Friday rather than whoever arrived with the best model of it.
That should worry the teams who have been winning on preparation and encourage the ones who have been quick but inconsistent. It also gives the stand ins a genuine chance. Liam Lawson takes the Red Bull for a third race with Isack Hadjar still out injured, and this is the one weekend where not being the regular driver costs him almost nothing.
The thing to watch on Friday is not lap time but how quickly the field settles on a line through Turn 12. A 550 metre banked corner with the highest load of the year is exactly the sort of place where a small difference in approach becomes a large difference in tyre life by Sunday.
First practice starts at 13:30 local on Friday, qualifying is at 16:00 on Saturday and the race starts at 15:00 on Sunday. We will be covering the weekend on our live blog, with the current order on the 2026 championship standings page.
