F1 Faces Complicated Question of Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya's Future

• F1 Spanish Grand Prix lived up to its reputation on Sunday as a tough-to-pass circuit.

• Lewis Hamilton's win marked the 23rd time in 31 races that the pole winner went on to win the race.

• With two Spaniards on the grid, Formula 1 would love to have a race presence in Spain.

The Spanish Grand Prix doesn’t have a contract for 2022, and this year’s race was a one-off deal to keep the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya track on the F1 schedule.

It’s unlikely that F1 would drop the race with Fernando Alonso back in action with Alpine and Carlos Sainz Jr. racing for Ferrari. But there are problems as well.

It is a complicated political situation because not all the people in Catalonia want to remain Spanish and the country is not wildly keen to pay for a race in a region that tried to break away just a few years ago.

The biggest problem is not politics, however, nor the difficulty in funding the race. The fundamental trouble is that the circuit is not good for racing. The Formula 1 drivers like it because it is fun to drive, but they all say that racing in almost impossible because there is nowhere to overtake. An attempt was made this year to change that situation with major work at Turns 10 and 11, but it was quickly clear that the F1 drivers thought it was probably worse than it was before, rather than better.

That begs questions about how the design was decided upon.

“Turn 10 was probably the only overtaking opportunity apart from Turn 1,” Pierre Gasly said. “And now there’s not as much of a big braking zone.”

It doesn’t help that the run down into Turn 1 is also not much good these days either, because the F1 cars have so much downforce that the braking zones are too short. And this year, the competition between the teams is so close that there are not sufficient differences in performance to allow one car to pass another.

After qualifying, the drivers all said the same thing, some more diplomatically than others.

“It’s difficult to create the delta you need to overtake when people are separated by hundredths of a second,” said Lando Norris.