The Madring: Madrid's new F1 circuit, corner by corner

A brand-new Formula 1 circuit is rare. A brand-new circuit in a major European capital is almost unheard of. On the weekend of 11–13 September 2026, the Spanish Grand Prix will be run for the first time at the Madring — a 5.4-kilometre, 22-corner hybrid circuit threaded through the IFEMA exhibition grounds and the Valdebebas district on the north-east edge of Madrid, five minutes from Barajas airport. It will be the first Formula 1 race held in the Spanish capital since Jarama in 1981, a gap of forty-five years, and it arrives with a ten-year agreement that moves the Spanish Grand Prix away from Barcelona.

New circuits normally get described in press releases and then judged in September. This article does something more useful: it walks the entire lap, corner by corner, using the layout details the organisers have published and the construction that has actually been completed — and then shows you how to trace the circuit yourself on satellite imagery and get a lap time estimate before a Formula 1 car has ever turned a wheel there. After qualifying on 12 September, we'll publish a follow-up comparing our traced estimate against the real pole lap. Consider this the "before" photograph.

What the Madring actually is

The name is a portmanteau — Madrid plus the "-ring" suffix that German-speaking motorsport gave the world — and the circuit itself is a hybrid in the most literal sense. Roughly 2.2 kilometres of the lap is brand-new, purpose-built track laid across open ground in Valdebebas. The rest runs on existing roads around the IFEMA fairground complex, including a genuine city street, Ribera del Sena, which forms the longest straight on the circuit. The organisers describe it as a circuit with two personalities: a conventional street-circuit section around the exhibition halls, and an open, fast, purpose-designed section to the north where the signature features live.

Construction has been handled by a joint venture between Acciona and Eiffage, with a build cost reported at around £125 million. Asphalting was scheduled for completion by the end of May 2026, clearing the way for FIA homologation over the summer. Unusually for a modern Grand Prix venue, the site is genuinely urban: reachable by metro, commuter train, and bus, and closer to an international airport than any circuit on the calendar. Whether the racing justifies the ambition is the question September will answer. The layout, at least, gives it a fighting chance — and for reasons worth walking through in detail.

Sector one: the IFEMA street section

The lap begins on a 589-metre main straight running along the exhibition centre. The start line sits just over 200 metres before Turn 1, which matters for race starts: the field will arrive at the first braking zone still bunched, and Turn 1 is a genuine stop — from around 320 km/h down to roughly 100 km/h. The organisers have designed it explicitly as an overtaking corner, and the geometry supports the claim: a long, hard braking zone at the end of a full-throttle run is the most reliable passing formula in circuit design.

Turn 2 follows immediately, a slow right-hander at the lowest point of the circuit, 671 metres above sea level. That elevation figure is worth noting now, because the Madring does something most street circuits cannot: it climbs. The gap between the circuit's lowest and highest points is 26 metres — modest by Spa standards, dramatic by street-circuit standards, and all of it earned from roads that already existed.

From Turn 2 the track sweeps into Hortaleza, a fast right-hander named after the neighbouring Madrid district, which launches the cars onto Ribera del Sena — an ordinary city street for fifty-one weeks of the year, and for one week the fastest place on the circuit. The straight measures 837 metres, and with the run-up from Hortaleza taken flat, the organisers expect a top speed around 340 km/h before the heaviest braking event of the lap: down to roughly 80 km/h for the tight sequence that follows. Two enormous braking zones in the first third of the lap is a deliberate choice, and a good one. It gives the circuit two distinct overtaking theatres before the terrain takes over.

Sector two: the climb and the blind corners

Out of the slow section, a left-hander opens the Subida de las Cárcavas — the climb toward the Las Cárcavas district — an 8% gradient on public roads that gains ten metres of elevation and crests at Turn 7, the highest point of the circuit at 697 metres. Turn 7 is blind. The track then falls away at 5% on the other side, which means drivers commit to a corner they cannot see, over a crest, onto a descending exit. This is the kind of feature that circuit designers spend fortunes manufacturing on flat sites, and the Madring inherited it for free because the roads were already there.

The descent leads into Turn 8, which has an uphill, blind entry of its own, and then into a pair of fast chicanes on the approach to the northern arena — including one the organisers call The Bunker, taken over yet another blind approach. If a pattern is emerging, it should: the middle sector of this circuit is built on committed, sight-limited, high-speed direction changes with real elevation underneath them. That is not the profile of the "repetitive 90-degree street circuit" that Formula 1 fans have learned to dread.

Then comes La Chicane, Turns 10 and 11 — a 57-degree right flicked into a 78-degree left — added to the layout during development to bring speeds down before the circuit's main event. It was a safety decision, but it has a happy side effect specific to the 2026 generation of cars: a run of slow and medium-speed corners immediately before a long full-throttle section is exactly what the new power units want, because it lets drivers harvest energy and arrive at the banking with a full battery rather than a clipping one.

La Monumental

Turn 12 is the reason this circuit will be talked about regardless of what the racing does. La Monumental — named for the great Spanish bullrings, whose semicircular geometry it borrows — is a 550-metre banked corner sweeping through an arc of more than 270 degrees. The banking runs at a 24% gradient, roughly 13.5 degrees, which is the maximum the FIA permits on a Formula 1 circuit. At its steepest the corner rises ten metres, a wall of asphalt that took two paving machines working in synchronisation and more than 1,800 cubic metres of asphalt mix to lay — enough, the builders noted, to cover the Bernabéu pitch 25 centimetres deep.

The numbers as a driving proposition: entry speeds approaching 300 km/h, a sustained compression in the region of 4G through the middle of the corner, and around six seconds spent on the banking per lap — the longest single-corner commitment on the calendar. The corner is 12 metres wide, which the organisers hope will support multiple lines: run high for cleaner air, stay low for the shorter distance and the slipstream. And it has one final trick. The exit rises over a crest and drops away, meaning the corner ends blind, with drivers looking up at asphalt and sky before the track reveals itself again.

The obvious comparison is Zandvoort's banked corners, but it is not a close one. Zandvoort's banking is progressive and brief; La Monumental is a sustained, arena-scale bowl with grandstands for roughly 45,000 people wrapped around it and hospitality perched on the inside. The organisers have leaned into it completely — the race trophies, designed by Pininfarina, take the shape of the banking itself. Every circuit needs a signature. The Madring built its entire identity around one corner, and having studied the geometry, it is hard to argue with the choice. For a longer look at how banking actually works and why it is far harder than it appears, see our piece on why ovals are harder to design than they look.

Sector three: the Valdebebas sweeps and the tunnel

The exit of La Monumental fires the cars, at over 300 km/h, toward Turn 13 — a sharp left of roughly 84 degrees that demands braking down to about 140 km/h. That is the third genuine overtaking zone of the lap, and arguably the most interesting one, because the preceding corner is banked: a driver who exits the bowl on a better line, or with more battery in hand, arrives at Turn 13 with a run.

From Turn 13 to Turn 17 the circuit flows through the fastest stretch of purpose-built track on the lap — the sweeping Valdebebas section, laid across what used to be festival ground, where the designers had space to let the cars breathe through quick, open direction changes. It ends with a feature only one other circuit on the calendar can claim: a tunnel, carrying the track back under the motorway from Valdebebas toward IFEMA. Monaco finally has company. From there, a run of tighter fairground corners brings the lap home to the 589-metre main straight.

What kind of racing should we expect?

On paper, the Madring has three legitimate overtaking zones (Turn 1, the end of Ribera del Sena, and Turn 13), a banked corner wide enough for line variation, real elevation, and a sequencing of slow and fast sections that suits the energy management of the 2026 cars. That is a stronger starting hand than most new circuits are dealt. The organisers also had a Formula 1 driver in the room: Carlos Sainz has served as the event's ambassador and has said publicly that his request to the promoters was a circuit with genuine character rather than another anonymous street layout.

The honest counterweight is that every new circuit is described in these terms before its first race, and the history of grand promises is mixed — a subject we covered at length in our profile of Hermann Tilke, whose circuits taught the sport that renders and reality can diverge. Street sections punish errors with walls, which can produce caution rather than commitment. Banked corners taken flat by everyone produce spectacle but not necessarily passing. And no simulation, including ours, fully captures how a field of real cars behaves in dirty air. The layout deserves optimism. The verdict belongs to September.

Trace the Madring yourself — before F1 gets there

Here is the part you can do today. The Madring's location is preset in RaceTrackDesigner — choose R16 — Madrid GP (IFEMA) from the location list and the map opens directly over the circuit site. Switch to satellite view and the geography of everything described above is laid out beneath you: the IFEMA halls, Ribera del Sena running past the exhibition centre, the climb into Las Cárcavas, and the open Valdebebas ground where La Monumental now stands.

Trace the lap: click waypoints along the route, use straight-line mode for Ribera del Sena and the main straight, close the loop, and the analysis unlocks — estimated F1 lap time, corner count, speed zones painted along the track, and a corner-by-corner breakdown. Use the custom turn labels to name the corners properly (our guide to circuit and corner naming covers where names like Hortaleza and La Monumental come from). Then save the share link. When pole position is set on 12 September, we will publish the comparison between the app's physics estimate and the real thing — and you'll be able to check your own trace against both.

Very few people ever get to study a Grand Prix circuit before the first Grand Prix. For the next two months, the Madring is exactly that: 5.4 kilometres of finished asphalt that no championship has touched. It is the best moment there will ever be to learn this circuit.