Madrid F1 GP: 28 Days Left Amid Cost Doubts and Valencia Ghost

Madring Status 28 Days Before the Madrid F1 Grand Prix

There are 28 days left until Madrid lights the signal, but leaked images of the track do not help sell it. The grandstands are assembled, yes. The rest—asphalt, surroundings, access—still looks like a fenced-off wasteland. The name Madring has entered popular language as a joke, which no communication campaign can fix: when a project is renamed by itself, the brand has already lost the battle.

The circulating nicknames—"Secarralcing," "Demigrantring"—say more about the mood than about engineering. Beneath the humor lies a serious economic question that no one has answered with numbers: how much does this cost, who pays for it, and what remains when the last camera turns off?

How Much Does Madring Cost and Who Pays?

There is no closed public breakdown. The question of whether IFEMA, the manager of the venue where the track is built, is or is not a public entity looms over the entire operation. If it is, the circuit was not paid for solely by private initiative, as promised. If it is not, someone will have to explain why the land, permits, and works have moved at this estimulante ilegal.

The suspicion of a windfall profit does not come out of nowhere. It comes from the opacity of contracts and a figure circulating without official denial: the hypothesis that the total cost, adding years of exploitation, could approach €1 billion. This is a projection, not an accounting datum. The problem is that the opposite figure also does not exist.

The parallel market has already moved. There is talk of renting balconies overlooking the straight for €3,000 per weekend and packages resold well above their original price. Quick money, short margin, and a fundamental question: will that return anything to those who provided the land?

The Montmeló Mirror: €60 Million in Losses and €140 Million in Public Money

The uncomfortable mirror is in Catalonia. Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya (Montmeló) has posted red numbers since 2009 and accumulated more than €60 million in losses in the last decade alone, between 2013 and 2022. Public money allocated to sustain it exceeds €140 million since 2013, not counting capital increases covered by the Generalitat de Catalunya (Catalan regional government). The facility is managed by Circuits de Catalunya SL, a public-private company. That year-by-year breakdown leaves a trail that no official balance sheet has wanted to summarize in a single figure.

And then there is Valencia. The street circuit that sold glamour on the port's edge ended up as the canonical example of what not to do: promise, photo, silence, and debt. Madrid did not invent the genre. It only reissued it with a bigger budget and a worse environment.

The Track: 90-Degree Corners and Yellow Flags

The sporting product does not sell itself either. After the first practice sessions, the reading was almost unanimous among championship trinc: 90-degree corners linking straights between fences, a short oval stuck to the complex, little overtaking zone, and yellow flags as routine. Some summarized it with more malice: it looks designed with the track editor of a nineties video game.

Added to this is physical antiestéticar. A single-seater flying off a street track has no escape route: the grandstand is right next to it. The public repeating this aloud does not make it a certainty, but it should force the organization to publish its safety protocols before the first beep, not after.

Unfinished Works: The Markham Precedent

The calendar is tight and precedents do not help. IndyCar experienced a nearly identical case this year: the debut on the Markham street circuit suffered delays due to unfinished works—race bridges, safety barriers, and timing cables incomplete—and the promoter, Green Savoree Race Promotions, had to answer to organizers before cars could take to the track. If a grid with decades of experience stumbles on this, a street circuit built from scratch in a wasteland has every chance of doing so.

In Madrid, the local version is that of those who have walked the site and assume the race will be run on a half-finished track. Race and scaffolding, simultaneously.

Why Jarama Was Never a Real Alternative

Why wasn't the Jarama circuit rescued? Because the track is not in the municipality of Madrid, but in San Sebastián de los Reyes, and because it belongs to RACE (Royal Automobile Club of Spain), a private entity with little desire to undertake works to host F1 for two years. Adapting it to current standards would require expropriating land in one of the region's most expensive areas: no mayor puts their reelection on the altar for a paddock.

What remains is the neighborhood front, the most predictable one. Noise, cut-off traffic, and urban planning in which, it is argued, the circuit did not appear when approved. If that is confirmed, legal appeals are served.

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With this panorama, making a prediction requires prudence. The race will be held: with 28 days left and grandstands already assembled, canceling would be an unsustainable political cost. What cannot be anticipated is at what price. Most likely, in two years we will have a decent sporting balance, an opaque economic balance, and a public bill that someone will have to claim. If the result resembles Montmeló, the "Secarralcing" joke will have been, as almost always, the cheapest part of the project.