When speed awakens an old, almost haunted world, where the banked turns seem to remember what time has tried to forget
Formula 1 cars are returning to Madrid, the capital of Spain, this year after 45 years. The last time was on June 21, 1981, at the labyrinthine Jarama circuit, when the legendary Gilles Villeneuve claimed one of those victories that seem like a glitch in the code of reality.
Driving a red “double-decker bus” bearing the prancing horse emblem on its nose, he managed to stay ahead of four formidable pursuers, holding them off for one hour and 46 minutes in a battle that seemed to defy all logic. Until the five cars crossed the finish line almost simultaneously, separated by just 1.2 seconds.
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Antonio Tomaini, the man who had designed that Ferrari, stood watching in amazement from his elevated position in the pits, while Gordon Murray, of the rival Brabham team, commented: “This remains the most well-deserved victory by a driver in the history of racing.”
It was Gilles Villeneuve’s final victory.
But to trace the origins of the Spanish Grand Prix, we must go back even further, to 1913, before Spain endured two world wars and a civil war.
Back then, in Guadarrama, Don Carlos de Salamanca, a Rolls-Royce importer in Madrid and third cousin of the King of Spain (!), found himself at the top of the standings, behind the wheel of a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost.
And, of course, victory could not have come without a little royal assistance from his cousin.
Spain had just opened the door to speed. And ten years later, it threw it wide open.
Because there, near Barcelona, a racetrack would be born that even today seems like a piece of another, darker world, escaped from some motorsport nightmare: The Sitges-Terramar.
Albert Divo won the 1923 Spanish Grand Prix there in a Sunbeam, with Polish Count Louis Zborowski in an American Miller finishing behind him. And when you consider that we’re talking about more than a century ago, the Frenchman’s average speed is even more awe-inspiring: 142.7 km/h.
But it wasn’t the speed that made Sitges terrifying. It was the road.
Its two banked turns, made of concrete, rose to an angle of 60 degrees. They didn’t look like turns but rather like two enormous walls that someone, for reasons lost somewhere in the mists of time, had erected facing each other on the earth.
But Sitges seemed doomed from the moment it was born. The magnificent racetrack never really got to experience the life its creators had dreamed of. Its owners faced enormous financial problems from the very beginning; the drivers were left unpaid after the 1923 race, and Sitges never hosted another Grand Prix.
And yet, more than a century later, it still stands there. A massive chunk of concrete, lost among the trees, like a ghost of an era that refuses to fade away. The old curves still seem to retain the shape of the cars that raced over them, and when silence falls, Sitges gives the strange impression that it was never truly abandoned.
And now, a century later, Spain is gaining something that seems to reawaken that same old memory: the Monumental.
A 24-degree banked turn, more than half a kilometer long, that will put modern racers to the test at the brand-new Madring in Madrid.
It doesn’t have the 60-degree angle of Sitges, nor the bare concrete of an era when drivers entered the turns almost naked in the face of death. And yet, something from that era seems to have returned.
At the Monumental, the car enters the corner at 280 km/h, the exit climbs “blindly,” and for more than four seconds the car remains flat out, with lateral and vertical forces bending the tires, suspension, and chassis, while the engine oil shifts abruptly to one side and the pump struggles to recirculate it.
The radius, the bank, and the elevation change constantly, as if the track itself were transforming with every meter beneath the wheels. And the further you go, the more it seems to trap you within itself, leaving you to wonder if there’s actually a way to get out of there the way you came in.
A century after Sitges, everything has changed. Everything, except for that old, unanswered question that resurfaces amid the roar of the engines: How fast do you dare to go?
