Carlos Sainz has become the first current F1 driver to turn a lap of Madrid’s new Spanish Grand Prix venue, taking a Ford Mustang GT out on the partly finished ‘Madring’ layout ahead of its debut on the 2026 calendar.
The circuit, built close to Barajas airport, is still a construction site in places, with an FIA inspection scheduled for the end of this month. But the promotional shakedown did enough to underline what F1 wants Madrid to be: not just another street race, but a hybrid that tries to marry tight, urban sections with a faster, more open-feeling back end.
Sainz, now in his second full season with Williams and appointed as a Madring ambassador last year, is an obvious face for the project. He’s Madrid-born, he’s articulate, and he’s got that rare ability to sound like he’s selling something without it coming off as completely stage-managed.
The part he couldn’t stop talking about was “La Monumental”, the signature corner the organisers have been teasing for months: a 500-metre, banked right-hander with 24 degrees of banking — and, according to Sainz, a little extra sting because the banking itself crests and falls away.
“Twenty-four degrees of banking, sustained for almost half a kilometre, so 500 metres,” Sainz said in footage released by Formula 1. The pitch is clear: take the sort of multi-line commitment we associate with Zandvoort’s banked Turn 3, scale it up, and drop it into a venue designed to be a showpiece for a new era of Spanish F1.
The timing is neat, too. Zandvoort is set to leave the calendar at the end of this year, and Madrid’s banking will inevitably be framed as a successor of sorts — a way to keep a bit of that high-line/low-line theatre in the mix, just transplanted to a far bigger stadium-style setting.
Sainz leaned into the racing implications, suggesting the geometry could offer a way around the modern problem of following closely through long corners. “This will allow for side-by-side racing, especially for getting out of the dirty air – go high [or] go low – with the idea of [Turn 3 at] Zandvoort,” he said.
That’s the optimistic version, and it’s the one Madrid will be desperate to make real. With a corner that long, the airflow story matters: if the car behind can choose a different line and still keep the load in the tyre, you can create overtaking moves that don’t rely purely on DRS and a braking zone. If not, it risks becoming an impressive-looking procession generator — spectacular in photos, less so in the lap charts.
Where the organisers are clearly trying to stack the deck is with the viewing experience. Sainz was told 45,000 spectators will be positioned around La Monumental on race day, and his description made it sound like a proper enclosed cauldron rather than a typical temporary grandstand. “It’s going to be a tube of grandstands all the way around that corner,” he said. “I don’t think you get that in many places.”
The other theme from Sainz’s run was that Madring is deliberately two circuits stitched together — and he sounded pleasantly surprised that the transition works.
“Honestly? Impressive,” he said afterwards. “Impressive because I didn’t expect to have so much fun. I didn’t expect it to be so flowing, so wide, where you can actually lean on the car for so long.”
The line that will have engineers nodding — and promoters grinning — was his realisation of the speeds involved in a heavy road car. “I just realised how fast we were going and I was like: ‘If we’re going fast in this [car], imagine a Formula 1 car.’”
That’s exactly the point. Madrid doesn’t want to be sold as a slow, 90-degree-corner slog, even if it contains a “street-style area” by design. Sainz described going from that tighter section into a blind corner where “you see absolutely nothing and suddenly the whole track opens up”.
“It’s like you go through a screen and you go into a different world, like a different track!” he said. “I love that the track has two completely separate, different parts and you go from a street part to a fully open, wide part.”
For Spain, the narrative writes itself. There are two Spanish drivers on the 2026 grid — Sainz and Aston Martin’s Fernando Alonso — and Madrid’s arrival gives the country a new focal point at a time when the calendar is relentlessly competitive. Getting a home-grown front-row regular to play ambassador, then putting him in the first promotional laps, is more than PR: it’s a signal of intent that this race wants instant identity, not a slow burn.
Whether La Monumental becomes the “epic” corner Sainz is promising will depend on the details that only show up when the F1 cars arrive: the bumps that remain, the grip evolution, how the wind swirls through an open stadium section, and whether the racing line genuinely offers options rather than one inevitable groove.
But for a track that hasn’t even passed its final inspection yet, Madrid has already found its hook — and Sainz has done his job by making it sound like more than just another pin on the world map.
