Formula 1's newest venue threw open its gates this week. With the Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix barely in the rear-view mirror, paddock media descended on the Madring — the 5.4km, 22-corner circuit on Madrid's IFEMA exhibition grounds that takes over the Spanish Grand Prix on 13 September. Three months out, it is still a building site. The question everyone arrived to answer: is the track, and its showpiece banked corner, actually any good?
That corner is La Monumental. At roughly 550 metres it is billed as the longest corner in Formula 1, banked to a maximum 24% — around 13.5 degrees — with cars expected to spend close to six seconds inside it. It is the feature the whole project is being sold on, and the feature the skeptics have circled.
"Is the Bank Monumental Corner going to be great or just a gimmick?" asked The Race's Ed Straw, framing the central debate from the site. His colleague John Noble, who toured the circuit for the first time at the opening ceremony, came away encouraged by what a track map cannot show. "One of the core elements of a good racetrack has always been elevation," Noble said. "I was surprised here actually how much elevation there is. It's going to be a spectacular corner before it drops down into the back section."
The man selling it is Carlos Gimenez, the Madring's chief operations officer. "This is special because not only of the inclination, also the length is extremely long," he told The Race. "Due to the huge inclination it could operate like a virtual length for the drivers. But it's also interesting to mention that the exit of the turn to reach the next one has blind spots. So it's going to challenge a lot the drivers." Gimenez said the banking was built up artificially from excavation soil dug elsewhere on the plot — a deliberate choice to avoid the carbon footprint of trucking material away.
Carlos Sainz, the Madrid-born Williams driver and the circuit's ambassador, has skin in the game. Asked at the launch what La Monumental will be like to drive, he leaned optimistic. "I can already tell you it looks impressive because we're going to be entering that corner at a very high speed already, around I think 180 to 200 kph," Sainz said. "My feeling is a corner that is going to be flat out the whole way, and it's going to create an overtaking opportunity into the next left."
Not everyone is convinced it will be flat — or that flat is even good. On The Race's podcast, Madrid-based journalist Diego Mia flagged the mixed signals: "Carlos was saying today that it could be flat out... but a few weeks before, when he did the lap in the Mustang, he wasn't saying it was going to be flat, and he obviously had to lift." The deeper worry is design philosophy. As the panel noted, an easy flat-out corner can be a dud — Eau Rouge was effectively flat for a generation of cars before drivers stopped seeing it as a challenge — and F1's last purpose-built Spanish street race, Valencia, was forgotten almost immediately.
Kym Illman, who spent hours filming the site, is in no doubt the place will be ready. "Is the Mad Ring going to be ready for the September race weekend? I say yes," he said, comparing La Monumental's potential to "Spa's Eau Rouge or Silverstone's Maggots and Becketts." With grandstands set to ring the banking, he expects an atmosphere "a bit like a stadium, a bit like a cauldron." Illman pegs eventual capacity at up to 140,000 a day and the race's value to Madrid at half a billion euros across the 10-year deal.
The honest answer is that nobody knows yet. As Noble put it, a track "doesn't really come alive until an F1 car's on it." Madrid finds out on 13 September, when the Spanish Grand Prix — taken from a Barcelona race now dropping to alternate years — gets its first competitive run through La Monumental.
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*Originally published on [Formula 1 News](https://newsformula.one/article/f1-madring-la-monumental-spectacle-or-gimmick). Visit for full coverage.*