Fernando Alonso on La Monumental during Friday practice
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La Monumental, Turn 12 at the new Madring Formula 1 circuit, was designed to be the corner everyone talks about ahead of the Spanish capital’s return to the calendar this weekend.
The 550-metre, 24%-banked sweep named after Madrid’s bullring, with a 45,000-capacity grandstand wrapped around it, is the most recognisable image Formula 1 has used to sell its new Spanish home.
Looking past the spectacle, however, a more interesting story starts to emerge – one about what happens after the corner, not during it.
Here’s everything you need to know about Madring’s most famous feature.
The corner takes its name from Madrid’s bullring tradition, with La Monumental de Las Ventas — to give it its official name — providing the clearest local reference.
The name also carries a second meaning: “monumental” describes not only the arena it evokes, but the sheer scale of Madring’s own centrepiece.
The resemblance is intentional, as the corner forms a long, steeply banked semicircular sweep, with hospitality spaces on the inside and a grandstand for up to 45,000 spectators on the outside.
Construction of La Monumental in early 2026
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Construction of Madring officially began on 25 April 2025, with the circuit’s signature corner rising from the ground only around 17 months before Madrid’s first Formula 1 weekend.
The track has been designed as a signature arena-style spectacle as much as a test of the cars.
Carlos Jimenez, Madring’s chief operating officer, has said the one hard limit on the design was to not exceed a 24% gradient, equivalent to around 13.5 degrees – steep enough to be unlike anything else on the current calendar, but capped there for safety reasons.
The corner’s exit rises into a blind crest, adding a further complication drivers were unable to fully understand until they ran it in anger.
Building the corner was more complicated than applying that single constraint, though.
Dromo, the circuit-design firm behind La Monumental, has said the sequence went through numerous materially different configurations before settling on its final form, rather than following one predetermined line from the site’s constraints.
An earlier, more direct concept treated the corner as a fast continuation of the preceding straight; the version that was built instead reshaped the approach specifically to manage entry speed while preserving what Dromo called the “high-value braking event” immediately after the banking.
The banking is set to push tyres to their limits
Audi
The topography did some of the work for them. From the upper roundabout near the fort – the Spanish Civil War-era fortifications by La Mata Espesa that also give Turn 8, “El Bunker,” its name – the circuit descends roughly 12-13 metres through the Valdebebas escarpment before the banked section, and that descent, together with a late rise and a strong compression at entry, was folded into the driving sequence deliberately rather than simply inherited from the land.
The corner is described as one deliberately selected response among many rather than the only possible answer the site allowed.
Tyres face their own version of that challenge. Pirelli has said Monumental generates the highest vertical loading of any corner on this year’s calendar, a product of both its length and its banking, on a circuit that already ranks among the five most physically demanding on the tyres in terms of overall energy – with lateral forces in the same range as Barcelona and Silverstone.
Local hero Carlos Sainz, who had already driven the lap in a road car before the weekend, expected the corner itself to be taken flat out, and sees it less as a passing zone in its own right than as a set-up for one.
“It looks impressive because we’re going to be entering that corner at a very high speed,” he said. “My feeling is the corner is going to be flat out the whole way and it’s going to create an overtaking opportunity into the next tight left.”
Turn 13 might be where some overtaking is seen
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The Williams driver compared the slipstream effect through the banking to Zandvoort‘s, adding that a driver willing to run tight to the inside line will generate enough tow to have a genuine chance into the corner that follows.
Energy management will complicate that picture further, and not evenly across the grid.
Unlike the designated overtake-mode zones – of which the Madring has two, on the main straight and between Turns 3 and 4 – there is no regulated activation zone through Monumental.
How much power a car carries through the corner, and whether it has anything left for the following straight, is down to how each team chooses to manage it over a lap.
A team like Aston Martin, whose Honda power unit has struggled with hybrid deployment for much of the season, is one of those likely to find that trade-off more painful than most.
“I think for us we will not have the energy available to do La Monumental with the energy on. So, yes, probably someone can overtake us into 13,” Fernando Alonso warned on Thursday.
With a brand new surface and a tyre-punishing banked Turn 12, Madrid’s inaugural Formula 1 Spanish Grand Prix weekend could reshuffle the Mercedes-McLaren-Ferrari pecking order once again, writes Mark Hughes
That reading of the corner – as a set-up rather than a standalone spectacle – matches how its designers described it: protecting the overtaking chance into the next corner was, by Dromo’s own account, an explicit design goal, not an accident of geometry.
None of this makes La Monumental a dud as a spectacle – 550 metres at 24% banking, taken close to flat, is not something the current grid has experienced anywhere else, and the six seconds or so it will take to get through it will be unlike anything else on the calendar.
But it reinforces that the corner’s real function, by its own designers’ account, is to load the following braking zone rather than to be a passing opportunity in isolation.
Set that against Madring’s other likely overtaking zone, Turn 1 – a far more conventional proposition, with a 589-metre straight, speeds past 320km/h, and a heavy braking zone at the end of it – and a picture emerges of a lap with one corner built for cameras and at least two built for cars to actually swap places.
