01Workout Zone
If there’s a silver lining to triple headers, it’s that when you have a less than perfect weekend you can almost immediately hit the reset button. And after rolling the dice in Monaco on Sunday and missing out on the jackpot, we’re already focusing on the next opportunity, the Spanish Grand Prix and a circuit we know better than almost any other the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya.
Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya© Vladimir Rys
Until recently, the Montmélo circuit was F1’s test bed of choice and over the years we’ve logged more than 16,000 laps of this track across 153 test days and raced here 20 times since 2005 so it’s a track the team and our drivers know every centimetre of intimately.
And it’s one we’ve had plenty of success at too. Most famously, Max took his maiden F1 win here with an incredible drive, just over a week after joining the Team in 2016. But Max’s real purple patch here has been in recent times with victories in each of the last three races here. In fact, in nine Spanish races with the team Max has finished off the podium just once – when he was involved in a Turn 1 collision in 2017.
Max At The 2016 Spanish Grand Prix© Getty Images
Yuki, meanwhile, has raced here four times with AlphaTauri and VCARB, and so far, he’s finished in the points just once, in 2022 when he took a point with 10th place.
After last weekend, Max was looking forward to the reset and to challenging for a fourth straight win in Barcelona.
In Barcelona we should be able to race more, so we will see what happens in the final race of the triple header.
Max Verstappen“Monaco is not our track, it’s as simple as that,” Max said bluntly after last weekend. “In Barcelona we should be able to race more, so we will see what happens in the final race of the triple header.”
Bring it on.
02Challenges and Key Factors
The bendiness of front and rear wings has been a hot topic for some time in F1, with concerns being expressed that some teams have been stretching the limits of the regulations by running wings that flex under load. With rear wings, that meant creating a mini-DRS effect on straights as the rear wing deformed and created a wider slot gap. That gap was closed in China and then Japan with tighter controls on rear wing stiffness. And in Spain it’s the turn of front wings. The deflection tests have been made tougher, and teams will need stiffer front wings. While it’s unlikely to be a gamechanger it could fractionally close the gap between teams.
The Barcelona breeze is a well-known issue. The track is often subject to strong winds and unpredictable gusts have caught out many drivers in the past. In 2022, for example, a sudden change of wind direction resulted in an off at Turn 4 during the race for Max, which he said, “really caught me by surprise because I didn’t feel like I was actually braking later or throwing more speed into the corner”. If there is any pattern to the wind, it’s that we usually get a tailwind on the main straight in the morning, which produces a headwind into the high-speed turns. It then tends to rotate in the afternoon making balance a bit more difficult.
After two races at the softest end of Pirelli’s compound range, Spain flips the dial the other way, with Catalunya’s notoriously abrasive surface leading the selection of the C1, C2 and C3 for this weekend. It’s normally a two-stop race and last year Max won that way, starting on used C3 Soft tyres, switching to new Medium C2s on lap 17 and then, for the drive to the flag, fitting another set of Softs on lap 44. All of the top three last year worked a similar Soft-Medium-Soft race. Mercedes’ George Russell was the highest placed driver to try something different – finishing fourth on a Soft-Medium-Hard race. Just two drivers went for three stops last year – Sergio Pérez and Yuki. It didn’t work particularly well for either, although Checo converted P11 to P8 at the flag with a Soft-Soft-Medium-Soft race, while Yuki went from 17th to 19th, trying a Soft-Medium-Hard-Soft race strategy.
The Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya is not renowned for overtaking, with Turn 1 being the major opportunity. It means that grid position is pretty important. Of the 34 races at this circuit, 24 of them have been won from pole and 31 one from the front row. The furthest back on the grid anyone has won from is when Fernando Alonso went from P5 on the grid to the top step of the podium in 2013. Max is also among the non-front row winners with his 2016 where he started fourth on the grid.
03Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya: Track Layout & Key Features
Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya© Red Bull
There’s an old adage that if your car is good around Barcelona, it will be good everywhere. And in 2025 the maxim remains as true as ever. With a broad mix of corner types and a couple of long, fast straights the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya gives cars a proper workout, affirming strengths and exposing weaknesses. And that workout has been fine-tuned over the past few years with some tweaks that have made it even more of a challenge.
In 2021, Turn 10 was widened and made slightly quicker on entry, but the biggest change came in 2023 with the removal of the chicane that had been installed at Turn 14 in 2007. Disliked by drivers, the track was returned to its original configuration, and the final corner is now a much more interesting high-speed sweep.
The circuit is an ideal track for both testing and evaluating an F1 car. It has a wide range of corner types and speeds, plus some long straights. Slow-speed corners such as Turn 10 focus on mechanical grip, with high-speed sections such as Turns 3 and 9, and now the T13-14 sequence, test a car's aerodynamic grip.
