Verstappen slams Madring's braking zones and offers to redesign the Madrid circuit himself

Max Verstappen delivered a blunt verdict on the Madring circuit after qualifying for the Spanish Grand Prix in Madrid, telling reporters he has yet to find a single corner where overtaking is feasible and offering, only half-jokingly, to redesign the track himself.

“I still need to figure out a corner where to pass,” the four-time world champion said at the post-qualifying press conference. He acknowledged that the new tarmac was well laid, though already showing some bumps, but was unsparing about the layout: “The corners — you can’t overtake. For the braking zones, they need to learn that it should never be that you have to steer and combine that under braking.”

Verstappen’s core complaint centres on the way the Madring’s braking zones are configured. Where a straight braking zone allows a driver to pull alongside a rival, a braking zone that requires simultaneous turn-in leaves only one viable line through the corner, making defence trivially easy. “Then there is only one line and that makes it very easy to defend as well,” he explained.

When asked by Motorsport.com what specifically needed to change, Verstappen laughed: “Almost all the braking zones! If you give me the track map, I’ll sort it out.” He then added, more seriously, that he would genuinely be willing to provide input to the FIA and circuit designers on future layouts. “They can always ask me, ‘What do you think of this layout?’”

Polesitter Lando Norris echoed some of those concerns, noting that while the Madring is entertaining over a single flying lap, the experience is nowhere near comparable to Monaco, and that the circuit’s unusually long pitlane had not been properly thought through.

The criticism from drivers comes against a backdrop of incidents in the support series: both the Formula 2 and Formula 3 races at the IFEMA complex produced multiple crashes, though the Formula 1 field has so far avoided similar chaos. Whether the race itself validates the drivers’ concerns about the difficulty of passing will become clear when the Grand Prix gets underway.