Matt Bishop: F1's finest arena is reminder of why we fell in love with motor sport

Since there are just five days to go until the 2025 Brazilian Grand Prix at Autódromo José Carlos Pace – better known as Interlagos – it seems appropriate to pause, inhale deeply the moist São Paulo air, and pay homage to one of the true jewels in the Formula 1 crown. For in a calendar full of world-class venues, Interlagos remains one of the most visceral, most challenging, and most soulful places in which an F1 grand prix can be held. To my mind, it stands shoulder to shoulder with the two circuits on the current schedule that most F1 drivers, team people, pundits, journalists, and fans regard as the greatest: Spa and Suzuka.

There are circuits that are merely racetracks, then there are circuits that are also arenas rich in grandeur and emotion. Interlagos falls firmly into the latter category. From its position in the south of São Paulo, nestled among low hills on the east bank of the Guarapiranga reservoir, beneath a sky that can shift from sun to squall in a matter of minutes, it offers not only a panoramic spectacle for spectators but also, for drivers, an exacting test, for running Interlagos’s uncompromising anti-clockwise gauntlet demands stamina, courage, precision, and finesse.

History, too, is embedded in every metre of its sharply undulating asphalt. The sheer majesty of the older and longer version — at 4.946 miles (7.960km) rather than the current 2.677 miles (4.309km) — which hosted Brazilian Grands Prix from 1972 to 1977 and again in 1979 and 1980 — resonates still, for today’s circuit sits within the still visible original. If the shorter layout on which Max Verstappen and co will race this coming Sunday is formidable — and it is — then the longer one was wild. It was notoriously bumpy, and its sparse and inadequate catch-fencing left some of its corners delineated only by crumbling kerbs, embankments, or ditches not much safer than those that used to surround circuits long abandoned by F1 for safety reasons, such as Pescara, Ain-Diab, Monsanto, Riverside, Reims, Rouen, and Clermont-Ferrand.

The drivers who conquered the old Interlagos deserve our respect therefore. Take Emerson Fittipaldi, Brazil’s first F1 hero, who won the first two world championship-status F1 Brazilian Grands Prix, for Lotus in 1973 and for McLaren in 1974, and whose successes carried the aspirations of a whole nation. Take Carlos Pace, also a local lad, who won for Brabham in 1975. Take Niki Lauda, the winner for Ferrari in 1976, and Carlos Reutemann, victorious for the same Scuderia the following year, 1977, having also won for Brabham a non-championship race, F1’s first ever visit to Interlagos, in 1972. And take those two French daredevils, Jacques Laffite (Ligier) and René Arnoux (Renault), who won in 1979 and 1980, the last year in which an Interlagos grand prix was run on the original scary layout.

I have called the old circuit wild and scary. It was both – but it was also magnificent. In the Autocourse annual of 1977, Nigel Roebuck — more recently of this Motor Sport parish — included the following paragraph in his Brazilian Grand Prix qualifying report: “It was not until the third and final practice session on Saturday morning that James Hunt got it all together for an all-out flying lap, balancing his red and white McLaren superbly on the fine line of its limit to record a best of 2min 30.11sec: pole position. Balance was the key to Hunt’s performance. He was able to hold his McLaren in breathtaking powerslides through the long, fast fifth-gear corners, a performance that would bring tears of joy to the eyes of those who remember Woodcote [at Silverstone] the way it was, or a grand prix at [the old] Spa-Francorchamps. Interlagos is a mighty circuit.”

Two years later, in the Autocourse annual of 1979, Jeff Hutchinson included the following paragraph in his Brazilian Grand Prix race report: “Of all the tracks currently used in the grand prix season there is none tougher on either drivers or chassis than Interlagos. Designed way back in 1939, the five-mile circuit winds around within itself, and a natural amphitheatre makes it one of the best for spectators. Its 17 corners, from ultra-fast fifth-gear curves to tricky second-gear hairpins, demand all of a driver’s skill and the utmost from his car. Over the years, the track has dipped and bowed to the stresses of nature until, now, it is without doubt the bumpiest on the F1 calendar, and the cars consequently jump around in violent jerks of protest. Hanging on as though for dear life, the drivers can do nothing to ride out the wild bucking motion. They really earn their money here, nowhere more so than in the flat-in-fifth left-hander at the end of the pit straight.”

In 2014 I co-wrote an autobiography with Emerson Fittipaldi, Emmo: a Racer’s Soul, and here is some of what he said in a section about Interlagos: “When I refer to Interlagos, I mean the old Interlagos, the 4.946mile (7.960km) version, not today’s 2.677-mile (4.309km) version, which is still very good indeed but isn’t quite as wonderful as its predecessor. The old Interlagos was a simply stupendous racetrack – a seemingly never-ending series of oddly cambered switchback bends, some of them banked, most of them quick, and all of them difficult.”

The over-exuberant and F1-crazy crowd has sometimes made Interlagos wild and scary

Interlagos abuts a São Paulo favela – a shanty town – and its vibe can therefore be a bit intense. Attempted carjackings of vehicles driven in and out of the circuit by F1 team personnel are not uncommon. Indeed, in 2010, Jenson Button and his father John were held up by gunmen on the road beside the Interlagos favela. But McLaren had supplied Button – and his team-mate Lewis Hamilton, too — with armour-plated Mercedes B-class MPVs driven by police-trained chauffeurs, and Jenson’s and John’s driver bashed their B-class repeatedly into the cars nearby so as to create a gap through which he was able to drive to safety, even as the gunmen were letting off volleys of bullets at the tailgate of their fast-departing Merc.

Inside the circuit, too, the over-exuberant and F1-crazy crowd has sometimes made Interlagos wild and scary. The tribunes have always been daubed in baroque graffiti, and they remain that way to this day. In both 1974 and 1975, the race was started late, because broken glass had to be cleared from the track after drunken spectators had hurled their empty beer bottles onto it. But the atmosphere, although always rowdy, is usually celebratory rather than intimidating. The fans are part of the spectacle. They bring colour; they bring noise; they bring life; they bring Brazil’s unique mixture of fun and fervour.

As Emerson Fittipaldi says, today’s Interlagos is “still very good indeed”. However, although it was truly glorious, yesterday’s Interlagos could not survive F1’s embracing in the 1980s the need for greater safety – and between 1981 and 1989 the Brazilian Grand Prix was duly held at Jacarepaguá, in Rio de Janeiro. But from 1990 onwards – other than in 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic caused the race to be cancelled – it returned to Interlagos, albeit the shorter version. The great and the good of F1’s past 35 years have all won there: Alain Prost, Ayrton Senna twice, Nigel Mansell, Michael Schumacher four times, Damon Hill, Jacques Villeneuve, Mika Häkkinen twice, David Coulthard, Giancarlo Fisichella, Juan Pablo Montoya twice, Felipe Massa twice, Kimi Räikkönen, Mark Webber twice, Sebastian Vettel three times, Jenson Button, Nico Rosberg twice, Lewis Hamilton three times, Max Verstappen three times, and George Russell.

What I love most about Interlagos is that it refuses to be tamed. Some of today’s F1 circuits look and feel a bit like corporate theme parks, but even the modern Interlagos retains an unmistakable, inimitable, and uniquely scruffy rawness and energy. To stack it up alongside Spa and Suzuka is no idle boast, I realise that. Those two circuits have both earned their mythos: Spa is daunting and perilous, and the Raidillon/Eau Rouge combo has entered into racing folklore, where it will remain for as long as race cars continue to hurtle through it; Suzuka has its famous figure-of-eight layout, the technical challenge of its gnarly Esses and Degners, and its tweaked-for-safety but still treacherous 130R. You may argue that Interlagos has neither the punishing length of Spa nor the taxing geometry of Suzuka. Fair enough; but it more than compensates for those shortfalls in its atmosphere, in its vitality, and in its ability to deliver drama.

Finally, what about its weather? São Paulo has an uncanny habit of dispensing sunshine, cloud cover, drizzle, heavy rain, or high winds – or sometimes all five – within the same session. That unpredictability raises the stakes. Interlagos can therefore serve up races characterised by mood swings and plot twists, which is exactly what a great grand prix venue should offer.

In five days’ time the 2025 Brazilian Grand Prix grid will be formed, the power units will be fired up, the marshals will stand to attention by their posts, and, although Sauber’s Gabriel Bortoleto, the one Brazilian driver in the field, will not trouble the scorers in a meaningful way, the fans will still cheer and holler frenziedly until flag-fall. In other words, Interlagos will do its thing. If you are watching from your sofa at home, try to imagine that instead you are three rows back, sitting on a grassy knoll beside Curva do Laranjinha, Pinheirinho, or Junção, with São Paulo’s alternately shimmering then darkening skyline behind you, and a stiff breeze in the air, the cars jitterbugging their way over the bumps and crests right in front of you.

It is easy to gush. I confess I do. But some circuits demand it. Some circuits stir something deeper than mere enthusiasm. Some circuits make you reflect on what motor sport is all about, and on why you first fell in love with it all those years ago: speed, yes, but also history, legend, glory, bravery, skill, effort, and struggle. Interlagos is about all of that. So as we count down the five days until Sunday’s race, let’s tip our metaphorical hats to that grand old arena of racing, to its drivers past and present, to those who have won there and those who still hope to win there. In that parade of heritage and hope, Interlagos sits proudly – and, as a result, if you ask me, it is every bit as fine as Spa and Suzuka. And perhaps, in its own way, even finer.