All photos courtesy of Amanda Yu-Nguyen.
It was Thursday, May 14th, 2026, around 10:30 in the morning. I had no particular plan except to walk the perimeter of what will become the new Spanish Grand Prix, the Madring, and to see what there was to see.
What there was to see, mostly, was cranes. A lot of them. Construction equipment and fresh asphalt and stretches of dirt that haven’t become anything yet. Turns 6 through 12 were visible from where I could walk. None of it was complete. Some of it barely looked started.
The Valdebebas neighborhood itself is quiet in the way that suburban Madrid tends to be quiet: condos across the street, apartment buildings with balconies, residents going about their morning. People walked dogs. A few joggers passed. Resident opinion on the circuit, from what I could find online before the visit, has been loud and divided. There has been a vocal contingent strongly opposed to the project, with concerns about noise and disruption, and whether any of this actually serves the people who live here. I expected to see that tension reflected on the street. What I found was more muted. One condo across the circuit had a banner: “Stop Formula 1 Madrid.” Clear enough. But it was one. Given how charged the conversation has been online, I was bracing for more. Most of the F1 signage was absent from this stretch too, so the whole block had an odd in-between quality: neither fully claimed by the project nor visibly fighting it.
I had booked a room at Hotel101, and through my curiosity, I learned that the hallway windows on the eighth floor had a view of corners 10 through 12. The eighth floor wasn’t finished. The rooms weren’t listed. I asked permission, which was granted, and stood among furniture still waiting to be moved into rooms that don’t officially exist yet, looking out at a circuit that is also still becoming what it will eventually be.
It was a good view. And standing there, I did the math.
Race day is September 13th, 2026. That’s four months from when I was standing in that hallway. Four months to finish a new circuit in a city that has watched more than a few ambitious infrastructure timelines slip quietly past their original deadlines. Spain is not without precedent here: the country’s relationship with large public projects and the bureaucratic processes surrounding them is, to put it generously, complicated. Permits move slowly. Approvals take their time. The construction itself may be the most straightforward part of what remains to be done.
The circuit does not look four months from finished. I want to be wrong about that.
The question I kept thinking, walking the perimeter, was the obvious one: will they make it? There’s a particular feeling that comes from standing outside a future race circuit on an ordinary Thursday morning and looking at how much dirt still hasn’t become asphalt or pedestrian walkway yet. It is not panic, exactly. It’s a kind of patient skepticism.
And then there was the older gentleman I passed near one of the more active construction stretches. He was watching the cranes. Shaking his head. The expression of a man doing his own math and arriving at conclusions.
I walked past him. As I did, he said, without any particular emotion: “Es maravillosa.” It’s marvelous.
That is probably the right thing to feel about it. The timeline is tight in a way that is hard to talk yourself out of once you’ve seen the ground. Whether the investment pays off, whether September 13th arrives to find a finished circuit, all of that is still open.
But standing on an ordinary street on an ordinary Thursday morning, watching cranes move against a Madrid skyline, “marvelous” is not the wrong word for it either.
I’ll be watching closely between now and September. For now, the ground is there. The asphalt is going down. And someone who had clearly been watching a lot longer than I had looked at all of it and chose that word.
Some stories don’t come from a press release. They come from being in the room, at the track, in the stands. Field Notes is my firsthand account of motorsport as I live and experience it.
— Amanda
In Racing Color 
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