Formula 1 is having a FIFA moment and it’s only going to get worse
The new home for the Spanish Grand Prix provided a race of such poor quality F1 is at risk of trading revenue for relevance
A new circuit on the Formula 1 calendar always feels like a special moment. It’s a time when the only data the teams and drivers have are simulated; everyone is in the same boat when it comes to strategy and tyre use. How the aero from one car will impact the car behind it, what opportunities the straights and the corners will provide for overtakes and, of course, incidents, is only known in the virtual world. We all wait for the lights to go out to see what the real world brings. The thrills and spills of motorsport’s unknown yield some of the best moments.
The newest venue for the Spanish Grand Prix didn’t get the memo. Those of us who sat through the one hour, 34 minutes and 23 seconds of the inaugural F1 race held at the Madring will be questioning our Sunday afternoon viewing choices; I missed the Maldon Car Show and the opportunity to take a dangerously long look at an Opel Monza GSE. Here was a race that offered nothing. Not very little. Not a few highlights or short bursts of action. There was literally nothing to write home about. And yes, I can taste the irony of that last sentence.
It’s the team responsible for making a TV highlight reel I feel sorry for. Even the drivers could muster very little enthusiasm. On the cool down lap team radio Antonelli extolled all of the enthusiasm of someone who had been told he’d been given a dog. But only because his cat had died.
Parking hindsight for the moment, the writing was on the wall for all to see in Madrid; although clearly not to those who decided it was a good idea to host this race in Madrid’s equivalent of Birmingham’s NEC with a few access roads thrown in to make up the three-and-a-bit mile lap. And will continue to do so for the next ten years.
Clearly there are very few people working at Studio Dromo who designed this new ‘circuit’ who are old enough to remember what happened last time someone created an F1 track in a car park (Caesar's Palace, 1981) or have watched the Miami Grand Prix. Car parks make great venues for parking cars, less so to hold a round of a motor racing world championship worth several billion dollars.
The reasoning behind moving the Spanish Grand Prix from Barcelona’s Circuit de Catalunya to Madrid was sound. Catalunya is in the hills and as close to Barcelona as London Stansted Airport is to central London, only with worse public transport links.
Access to Circuit de Catalunya makes getting in and out of Silverstone look good and the facilities for the fans are more non-league than La Liga. Perhaps more importantly for F1 the hospitality opportunities are restricted. Oh, and the racing had gotten a little tedious after decades of the circuit being used for F1 testing; why F1 doesn’t insist on race venues being barred from holding test days is beyond me and clearly F1 management.
Sorry, there’s one more thing why F1 is now being hosted in southern Spain: Madrid was prepared to pay nearly double Barcelona to host the race, handing Liberty Media a fee in the region of $48m a year. It’s a deal that will run to 2035, with Match Hospitality investing $400 million over the next decade in hospitality facilities at the venue. The circuit alone has cost $83 million to build. And for what? 57 laps of nothing.
A result in 2026 decided by a virtual safety car that race-winning Kimi Antonelli benefitted from and that race leader at the time (and the quickest car of the weekend) Lando Norris, didn’t. That’s it. That was the race. Overtakes and meaningful racing? There was a short burst of half a lap of action involving the drivers fighting for eighth spot towards the end. Norris got close to Max Verstappen in the closing stages, but unfortunately the circuit designer had forgotten to include anywhere on the track to actually overtake that wouldn’t result in at least one driver breaching track limits and getting a penalty, so that was that.
Now, there are and have been many F1 races over the decades that have challenged concrete curing for excitement and entertainment. Some of these have been circuit-induced, some because of the technical regulations of the time. It’s the former that I don’t understand still being an issue today.
Many new circuits have been designed over the years that have failed to deliver anything resembling a race (Yas Marina, Lusail, Mexico, Singapore…) but F1 never seems to learn from these mistakes. Surely the Miami Grand Prix has taught Liberty that car parks still don’t make great venues for race tracks. And yes, as someone who has fallen asleep whilst sitting in the grandstand at the Monaco Grand Prix I understand Madrid is not the only venue unsuitable for modern F1 cars.
Expanding the Formula 1 calendar to as many races in as many countries on as many continents as possible makes perfect sense for the race promoter being paid eight figures to set up their circus in the paddocks of the highest bidders. But when this results in a race that has been phoned in and delivers no contest, excitement or entertainment, it’s a stain on the sport.
Then again, when the man responsible for the series, in this case ex-Ferrari F1 team boss and Lamborghini CEO Stefano Domenicali, goes full Gianni Infantino and insults the intelligence of the fans by saying only a very few people care about the intricacies of the sport and that it only matters so long as there’s on-track action, you know there’s trouble ahead.
This approach is okay if there is action on track, but when Lewis Hamilton executing a perfect half-donut down an escape road is the highlight of a 57-lap race you’ve got a problem. The sport becomes little more than a 90-minute marketing activity for the manufacturers and sponsors. Carry on like this and it’s only a matter of time before F1 decides in-race hydration breaks brought to you by Louis Vuitton are a good idea, and that it should award its own peace prize to the next new host that outbids an existing venue.
I was lucky this year. Halfway through the Spanish Grand Prix we had a thunderous storm at home, that not only cut the TV signal for a moment but also allowed me to stare out of the window and watch rainwater run down the road and a puddle form on our driveway. Others weren’t so lucky and saw every one of the 57 laps at the Madring.
It’s going to be a tough decade ahead watching the ‘racing’ in the car park of Madrid’s IFEMA exhibition centre, but F1 fans are a hardy bunch that have been put through the mill time and again. And for every Madrid car park there’s a Monza in a royal park.
