The new Madring street circuit is in an unprepossessing location, snaking around an exhibition centre near the Spanish capital’s international airport, about a 15-minute drive from the city with no traffic.
But as a test for the drivers, it is right up there.
“Very high risk” and “less margin than Monaco” were two remarks made by Mercedes driver George Russell over the weekend.
The walls are close and the demands of the circuit are amplified by the fact that the barriers angle back towards the track on the exit of many corners, making it all too easy to hit them.
Despite that, qualifying ran incident-free, which was very much not the prediction, especially after there were two red flags in final practice earlier in the day, one caused by seven-time champion Lewis Hamilton, the other by Haas driver Oliver Bearman.
Whether the race goes the same way is an altogether different matter.
This was Norris’ third pole of the year, and after the first two he took dominant wins in Hungary and the Netherlands.
At those races, though, McLaren were in a very different place.
“Tomorrow is going to be a very tough day,” Norris said. “It’s not going to be as straightforward as in Zandvoort and Budapest. There we were the quickest car. Yes, I’m on pole now, but we’re not in the quickest car. It took a perfect lap to get me on pole by 0.011secs today.”
Norris, it’s worth saying, also took pole despite missing virtually all of second practice with a gearbox problem.
Not only does that make the achievement all the more impressive, it also means he missed out on potentially crucial information about race-distance running, as that session is when the teams do their race simulations.
Tyre degradation is expected to be high. The high-grip, smooth new track surface, combined with the longest pit lane of the year – Norris jokingly described it as “6km long”, cut in half as it is by a building – should in theory lead to a one-stop strategy.
But the high tyre degradation could well push it to a two-stop, and because teams will try to avoid that, Antonelli said, “probably is going to be grandmother driving in the first 10 laps – we saw how steep the degradation can be, especially if you push too early”.
In Norris’ favour is that overtaking is expected to be especially difficult.
The straights are short, and some of the corner entries, which combine braking and turning, mean, as Verstappen put it, “there are no corners where you can pass”.
The drivers generally liked the challenge of the new track, Norris described it as “a little bit of everything”.
But all agreed on the fact that the corner entries need to be changed to facilitate racing.
Verstappen, who qualified third, said: “You can’t overtake. So, in some places, the braking zones, like, they need to learn that it should never be that you have to steer, that you have to combine under braking, because it doesn’t allow any kind of overtaking.”
Antonelli said: “It’s going to be tight. I spent two laps behind the Williams, trying to painfully get past. But it’s just really difficult.
“And when you’re behind, it’s tough. Yeah, the only thing you can do is try to put pressure on the car in front, trying to make them do mistakes or make them deg a bit more.”
The difficulty in overtaking is what makes this a real opportunity for Norris to take a third win of the season, even if the McLaren is not the fastest car.
As he put it: “It’s a long race, it’s a new track. You’ve got to know what corners to push, what corners not to push, all of these different things, what the battery’s then going to do.
“There’s a lot of stuff that I’ve got to spend my time doing tonight. So, it’s probably going to be a late one to try and get ahead of the game in some sorts. But the main part of the job was done today, so that’s the bit I’m most happy about.”
