Ferrari debuts on the Madrid GP track
Ferrari drivers, Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc, have already been particularly impressed. One, the 41-year-old English champion, even spoke with Luis Garcia Abad, former longtime manager of Fernando Alonso who is now the head of the organizing committee of the Spanish GP in Madrid, to warn him about how brutal the compression the human body experiences in the elevated corner called – evidently not by chance – “La Monumental”: it is a corner with a 24% banking, unique in Formula 1 and which promises to characterize the Madring somewhat like Eau Rouge is the symbol of Spa or like Becketts for Silverstone and 130R for Suzuka.
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The reason why Ferrari was able to already run on the semi-permanent Madrid track is already known: on July 9th the SF-26 fired up the engine for 200 km of a filming day (the second and last of the season), held also at the express wish of the GP promoters, who also needed to organize such an event to test all safety systems and verify the level of preparation of the facility ahead of the crowd surge on the weekend of next September 13th. An invitation, however, warmly accepted also by the Maranello team, which was thus able to collect some telemetry data to best prepare for the challenge of the only circuit of the 2026 season where Formula 1 cars have never run.
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The test day video at Madring
A first look at the Madring! 😮💨
Ride on board with Charles and Lewis for a full lap of F1’s newest track 👀 pic.twitter.com/MS8XPPVEaa
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— Scuderia Ferrari HP (@ScuderiaFerrari) July 13, 2026
A filming day that is now also a video available to everyone: Scuderia Ferrari has in fact published on its official social channels the first images showing the assembly of a lap, filmed at two different moments and from various cameras positioned on the SF-26, of Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton at Madring. A track therefore that comes to life and is no longer only available with virtual simulations, but instead shows us its significant ups and downs, direction changes, the two underpasses in addition to the already mentioned Monumental corner. A layout, that of the Madrid GP, that seems like a mix between the tracks of Jeddah – for the very fast sections with concrete walls just a few meters away – and maybe also Sochi, for the way in which, especially in the third sector, it turns around huge pre-existing constructions (specifically, the pavilions of the IFEMA exhibition center).
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