David Kirouac-Imagn Images
Red flag next to Max Verstappen's F1 car
Formula 1 usually needs a few races before drivers decide whether a new circuit is great, boring or completely ridiculous. Madrid’s brand-new Madring managed to establish a much more concerning reputation before an F1 car even started a competitive lap: Williams boss James Vowles called it a “car-wrecking track.”
The description followed a chaotic two-day Formula 3 test that produced 19 red flags, three broken chassis and six broken suspensions. Max Verstappen did not exactly dismiss the warning either, telling Motorsport.com that the circuit “could be” that punishing because even a tiny mistake in certain sections can immediately become a crash.
Formula 3 Basically Served As The Crash-Test Department
Nineteen red flags over two days is an impressive number for all the wrong reasons.
The test took place Aug. 24-25 as organizers gave Formula 3 cars the first significant running on the newly constructed 5.4-kilometer layout. The incidents were spread around the circuit rather than concentrated at one obviously broken corner, with cars repeatedly finding concrete walls and forcing sessions to stop.
Autosport reported that three chassis were damaged badly enough to join the casualty list, while organizers later jet-washed the fresh asphalt in an attempt to improve grip.
Then there is La Monumental.
The circuit’s signature corner is a 550-meter banked turn drivers are expected to take at full throttle for more than four seconds. The banking creates enormous sustained loads through the tires, suspension, and other systems, making it a mechanical challenge even if nobody hits anything.
Basically, the car can have a bad afternoon without the driver even putting it into a wall.
Vowles saw the F3 damage and came away with the obvious conclusion.
“OK, they’re F3 drivers,” he said. “But it’s a car-wrecking track.”
Not exactly the sentence teams want to hear while mechanics are unloading multimillion-dollar Formula 1 cars.
The F1 Drivers Have Almost No Margin For Error
The strange part is that several drivers seem to genuinely like the challenge.
George Russell said the speeds make Madring less forgiving than Monaco in certain places, while Lewis Hamilton compared the difficulty of finding the correct lines to Jeddah. Verstappen also identified Jeddah as the closest comparison because the walls sit close enough to punish small mistakes instantly.
That prediction did not take long to look reasonable.
During Friday’s second practice, Racing Bulls rookie Arvid Lindblad became the first F1 driver to crash at Madring when he hit the barrier at Turn 13 and heavily damaged his car. Reuters reported the incident briefly stopped the session.
So the inaugural weekend has already produced its first victim before qualifying.
Formula 1 has spent years facing complaints about modern circuits containing giant runoff areas that make mistakes relatively painless. Madrid apparently heard those complaints and chose the exact opposite approach.