Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya Track Map Poster

From the top of Turn 12, the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya drops nearly 30 meters (98 ft), the height of a nine-story building, through the last bends and along a pit straight more than a kilometer long, down to the first corner. The lap runs 4.657 km (2.89 miles) clockwise through fourteen turns on the edge of Montmeló, north of Barcelona.

It is often linked to the 1992 Olympics, and the cycling team time trial did start and finish here that summer, but it was born because the old Montjuïc park circuit could no longer keep up: in 1986 the Catalan Parliament voted unanimously to call for a new permanent track, farmland at Montmeló was bought in 1987, a million cubic meters of earth were moved, and it opened in September 1991. Montmeló itself is first recorded in the year 945, with a Latin name usually read as “hill of the badgers.”

Engineers love it: its mix of fast and slow corners, crests and cambers made it the place where new cars were tested before the season, so teams and drivers know it by heart. The wind is part of the puzzle, changing direction through the day, so a corner that grips in the morning can slide in the afternoon. Its corners carry sponsors’ names rather than tributes. And less than three weeks after it opened, in 1991, two rivals ran the length of the main straight wheel to wheel, millimeters apart.

The poster numbers all fourteen turns and letters in its ten corner names, with the old final chicane and the pit lane in muted lines. Blueprint, the drafting-room edition, suits the circuit engineers know best. The hill of the badgers became their favorite classroom.