The Madring ran its first Spanish Grand Prix the weekend before this 18 September. At the twelfth corner, named “Monumental”, the promoters had announced one of the great challenges of the layout: twenty-four degrees of banking, and a picture that shows up from a distance.
RaceFans writes that the circuit produced little notable action overall, and that the corner was no exception. One memorable moment across the weekend: a save by Franco Colapinto in qualifying. The rest of the time, the cars arrived there unable to go flat out, short of available energy on their power units.
Max Verstappen summed it up in one sentence. “I wanted to go flat [out], but then my battery dies, so you add a lift to have better deployment. So that’s my Monumental experience,” he told RaceFans.
Twenty-four degrees. At the post, we call that a slope, and a slope gets noted before the briefing: the camping chair slides, the thermos does too. The layout originally planned a straighter, faster approach. They added two corners before it. The regulations added a battery. The drivers added a lift. Everyone added something, nobody took anything away. I wave the flag. I don’t judge.
The promoters, for their part, claimed that “the circuit is suited to the new regulations” introduced this season. Verstappen reckons the corner should have been drawn the other way round: “It’s cool, the banking, but I think they should have done it the other way around. Initially more banking and then just flatten it out,” he told the same outlet. He also judges the corner more demanding for the junior categories, where flat-out did not look easy.
A corner banked at twenty-four degrees, and they lift off through it: from a reliable source, namely the television, the Raidillon never asked a battery for permission. We shall return to this.
Lando Norris, for his part, wants more of it going forward. “Cambered corners normally allow you to follow better. So, I think next year more corners should be a bit more cambered,” he told RaceFans.
It’s true, we checked: RaceFans.
