Almost no one had anything positive to say about Formula 1’s newest circuit following the first Spanish Grand Prix yesterday.
One point which several readers made about the Madring, echoed by Lando Norris in the press conference after the race, was why the designers of the hybrid track had created a layout so narrow, twisty and difficult for cars to race closely on:
It was absolutely terrible. I saw someone say they enjoyed FP4, which more or less covers it.
But I want to give it a zero [out of 10], because the track was so avoidably terrible.
It’s not a once-good track that has been outgrown, like Monaco, or a circuit designed using supposedly sound theory that just didn’t work, like Abu Dhabi. They had a more or less blank slate and (I can only assume deliberately, as no one is dense enough to have done that by accident) created a track it’s impossible to actually race on.
I’ve been watching F1 for over 30 years and (having spent some time reflecting to avoid recency bias) the Madring is the worst circuit, for its generation of cars, that I have ever seen.
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