Chaos looms at the brand-new Madring: drivers fear walls and blind corners

Prominent members of the frontrunning teams have quite a journey from their garages to their hospitality units. It is a 10-minute walk that has to be completed over and over again. There is no doubt that kilos will come off everyone in the paddock this weekend.

If anything stood out on the first day at the brand-new Madring, it was the enormous distances between the hospitality areas, the garages, and even the teams themselves.

Staff from the top teams have to walk ten minutes to get from one place to another, making it the longest one on the F1 calendar. They are particularly unlucky, as their garages are located at the start of the 550-meter-long pit lane.

Teams like Mercedes and McLaren have their trucks and technical facilities outdoors, while other teams, such as Red Bull Racing and Ferrari, are located in one of the large halls around the IFEMA Exhibition Center. Somewhere in between is the familiar media pen, where interviews will be conducted throughout the weekend. That is another ten-minute walk from the media center, so the journalists will be getting their steps in too.

There’s some groaning and sighing about the distances, but that will all fade if Madrid proves to be an asset to the calendar in terms of action and racing. With the ever-present walls close by, plenty of spectacle is expected. On Thursday, several drivers also predicted that there would be some crashes.

One concern for the drivers is that there are many blind corners, so from Friday onwards, they’ll be turning in on feel. Often, that will go well, but sometimes it won’t. It will also be important to have a good warning system, because no one wants to see a driver arriving at full speed without realizing that someone ahead has crashed.

Chaos is also being predicted for what is expected to be a spectacular qualifying session. There will likely be spots where the kerbs are attacked aggressively, but being just a single centimeter off line could send a car into the wall.

Moreover, the track is so narrow that one driver has already admitted having no idea how to get off the racing line during a cool-down lap, because there is simply no room. When the teams and drivers take to the circuit for the first time this Friday, it will undoubtedly be a case of feeling things out. Where is the grip? Where is it dangerous? What do you do with the kerbs?

Plenty of ingredients are already in place to make the Spanish Grand Prix an interesting one from the opening day of the weekend.