There was a time when circuit corner names were utilitarian labels, nothing more. Even for the greatest curves, inspiration was drawn from local landmarks or topography: think of Eau Rouge or Burnenville at Spa; Silverstone’s Stowe, or Paddock Hill Bend at Brands. Suzuka’s 130R is a reference to the turn’s radius, Monza’s Parabolica nods to its geometry. The Corkscrew at Laguna Seca and the Nürburgring Nordschleife’s Karussell need no further explanation. So when a corner – a brand-new one at that – is christened Monumental, that’s a lot to live up to.

Happily for those who bequeathed such an immodest soubriquet to Turn 12 at Madrid’s new Madring, it does. For starters, it has scale. From turn-in to exit it carves a 270-degree right-handed loop through 547m, making it the longest corner in F1. It has banking, 13.5 degrees of it, which equates to a 24% incline. That’s steep enough to make a circuit bus, on which visiting media are being treated to a very slow lap, feel as if it might topple inwards, towards the apex, during a glacial traverse. It’s wide: 12m side to side at its fattest. And did we mention that the exit is blind, over a crest?

There’s more: entry to La Monumental will be at up to 125mph for the 2026 F1 cars that will contest the circuit’s inaugural event, the Spanish Grand Prix, in September. In last season’s high-downforce ground-effect hybrid monsters, it would unquestionably have been a turn into which drivers hurled their machines at full throttle in fourth or fifth gear, pinball-style, before popping out the other end.

This year, the challenge will be more subtle: it’s a corner that’s probably flat in fifth, but not definitively. Williams racer Carlos Sainz, who also happens to be the Madring’s driver ambassador and a Madrid native, has driven the track extensively in a 500bhp 5-litre V8 Ford Mustang Dark Horse. Of La Monumental he reckons: “I probably need a simulator to give exact feelings and details of how it will be, but I can already say that it looks impressive, because we’re going to be entering that corner at a very high speed. My feeling is it could be flat-out the whole way, and it’s going to create an overtaking opportunity into the next tight left. The banking will allow you to maybe position the car higher up or lower down, if you want to get clean air to follow. It’s certainly something interesting.”

‘Interesting’ is one descriptor. ‘Stressful’ is another and in the eyes of Pirelli motor sport director Dario Marrafuschi, La Monumental will in fact be “the most stressful corner of the whole season”.

“We’re going to be entering that corner at a very high speed”

Loadings of around four lateral g are expected, sustained for two to three seconds – figures comparable to those returned from Copse at Silverstone and Turns 12 to 14 at Qatar’s Losail International Circuit. La Monumental’s banking, however, renders it a still more challenging proposition. Marrafuschi elaborates: “If you take the old banked Parabolica at Monza as an example, it has such a steep degree that it is ‘fully compensated’, by which we mean that if you don’t turn the steering wheel, then the load on the four tyres is equal – front axle, rear axle, the left and right side. As soon as you need to turn the wheel, and that is the case with Madrid, you need to steer the car to get through the corner, so you will have more load on the outer tyres. The left side will be more stressed for sure.”

Pirelli is currently sucking data from circuit engineers, as well as conducting its own exploratory visits to ensure that, two weeks out from the race weekend, it will have the richest possible data set to inform recommendations for pressures and compound choices. Memories of the 2005 United States GP at Indianapolis, where the banked Turn 13 wreaked havoc with the construction of Michelin tyres, are certain to make Pirelli urge caution.

One great corner does not a great circuit make, of course, and the Madring comprises 21 more. Unusually, though neatly, they can be grouped into two distinct sections, separated by the M11 motorway, under which the track passes on a clockwise tour immediately after Turn 6, then again between Turns 17 and 18.

The southern area has a resolutely urban, street-circuit feel, arising from its use of the wide access roads that serve the IFEMA exhibition centre, around which the layout is designed. Here the Madring is flat and angular, with several 90-degree lefts and rights. The route past IFEMA’s soaring halls is reminiscent of the Formula E track contrivance at the London Excel, though broader-shouldered and with room enough between corners for F1 cars to stretch their legs. It’s Baku-esque in nature, if not in backdrop.

The 589m main straight runs from Turn 22, El Parque, to a left-right Turns 1-2 chicane that echoes Monza’s pre-2000 Rettifilo. Half-close your eyes and you can see Ayrton Senna tripping over Jean-Louis Schlesser. (Place your bets on who’s hitting who here at 2.01pm BST on Sunday, September 13 after the 250m sprint from the grid.)

Turn 3, Hortaleza, then opens sympathetically into a near flat-out blast (Sainz: “this will be properly quick”) through the gentle, though tightening, right-hand Turn 4, where top speeds of 210mph will be hit before the second chicane of Turns 5 and 6. The first tunnel follows immediately, but don’t think ‘Monaco’: the cars will be through in a flash.

The underpass is a useful marker for the transformation in character that the Madring undergoes as it transitions from urban roads usable year-round outside the grand prix weekend to new, bespoke-built racetrack.

It starts with a climb from the Turn 6 exit through the barely-there Turn 7, Subida de las Cárcavas, before a heavy braking zone into Turn 8, El Búnker, another 90-degree right. At this point the Madring begins a plunge downhill from an elevation of 70m. The switch from ascent to descent is sharp enough to evoke images of flying Lotus 49s and Brabham BT44s at the Nordschleife and, while there’s no prospect of a modern F1 car ‘getting air’, a time-shifted Jim Clark or Carlos Reutemann might easily have hopped clear of the asphalt.

A glance to the left at the crest brings local apartment blocks into view no more than 200m away, along with a pair of concrete pillboxes that give El Búnker its name. These relics of the Spanish Civil War are protected as historical monuments and will soon bear witness to less bloody conflict.

“These relics of the Spanish Civil War are protected monuments”

The track swoops down through the right-handed Turn 9, into the wide La Chicane at Turns 10 and 11, inserted at the insistence of the FIA over concerns that approach speeds into La Monumental might otherwise exceed 185mph. And once through the climbing arc of Madring’s showpiece, there’s another dart downhill to Turn 13, a 90-degree left, which is certain to be one of the best passing opportunities, particularly if – as simulations suggest will be possible – cars are running two abreast through and out of La Monumental.

An organic flow through the quick Las Enzaladas de Valdebebas stretch from Turn 14 to Turn 16 leads to another 90-degree right at Turn 17, after which, once again at street level, the Madring’s urban south is rejoined.

In footballing parlance, this is a ‘track of two halves’ and the seamless union of two miles of street circuit with one-and-a-half miles of new-built but old-school sweepers has created something unique and compelling. It’s the result of conversations that began around five years ago, during the pandemic, between Luis García Abad, now general manager of the Spanish GP and head of the Madring project, F1 CEO Stefano Domenicali and José Vicente de los Mozos, then a senior Renault exec, who’s also president of the IFEMA executive committee.

Abad, who was previously part of Fernando Alonso’s management team from the early noughties, says that concerns over the long-term viability of Catalunya as the host venue for the Spanish GP had begun to circulate during Covid, prompting an approach from de los Mozos. “He and I had been friends for more than 20 years,” recounts Abad, “and he asked me what I thought about doing something in Madrid. I had a meeting with Stefano, we explored some possibilities and built a project plan for presentation.

“This is the reason we are here, because José Vicente asked me to evaluate the possibility of doing something at IFEMA – I literally drew the first designs myself! But at that early stage it was quite hard to think of it as something real. It was more like ‘is this even possible?’ One of the problems you have when you want to organise something like this is that you have to invest the money in the right place. If you build something from scratch, you need access, you need communications, you need energy, you need a lot of expensive things. But here that was covered in advance.”

Around £125m is being invested to make this vision for Spain’s new F1 circuit a reality, and the Madring has a contract to host the Spanish GP initially from 2026 to 2029. The cash is being channelled in a 62:38 public/private split, but with a strict stipulation that no new public funds can be directed towards the project, only profits made by IFEMA in previous years.

That said, it would be remiss not to report that on the day of our visit, both Hermann and Carsten Tilke, father-and-son managing partners of Tilke circuit design, emerge from Abad’s office shortly before our appointment with him. At the time of writing, there is an ongoing legal dispute between the Madring’s original designers – Italian architects Dromo Circuit Design (which features images of the Madring its main image) – and Tilke GmbH, engaged to complete construction works.

“The Madring is conceived as customer-focused and fan-first”

A recent LinkedIn post by Dromo states: “This matter has never been about seeking a privilege or obstructing an event. It is about something simpler: contracts, intellectual property rights, chain of title and respect for the work actually created. The IFEMA Madrid circuit was developed through a complex technical, architectural and creative process. When such work is later used, transferred, modified or commercially exploited, the legal basis for doing so must be clear.”

Tense though this legal stand-off appears, it does not seem likely to derail progress towards the first Spanish Grand Prix to be held in Madrid since 1981, a race famously won by Gilles Villeneuve in his Ferrari 126CK.

Abad is sufficiently pragmatic to acknowledge that the 45-year gap since that heady day renders Madrid “unknown” as an F1 destination. But, savvy businessman that he is, he points to the Madring’s fresh allure: “We have a lot of circuits already in Spain, so to have something in Madrid is very important. We realised that customers are ready to have that F1 experience here. We already have great transport connections with the airport and the metro. Fans who spend two hours in a traffic jam to get to a race… maybe they do that once, but not the second time. And this is our target. We are creating a customer experience event for F1 fans. That is important, because the fans are our customers.”

The Madring, then, is a circuit conceived in Formula 1’s modern idiom: customer-focused and fan-first. As Miami or Vegas are to COTA, so the Madring is to Catalunya.

Those two Spanish tracks that will this year host Formula 1 grands prix illustrate the sport’s continued evolution under Liberty ownership. Purists might wince at an established venue such as the CdeC being ushered from the calendar to a slot that it will share with the Belgian GP at Spa, on an annually rotating basis until 2032, but Liberty, even more than Ecclestone-era FOM, exists to extract maximum bang from its F1 buck.

Who’s to say that the creation of a city track with a classic circuit vibe won’t deliver what’s demanded by the sport’s new legions of Drive to Survive-nurtured acolytes?