Valencia Street Circuit

Motorsport track in Spain

Valencia, a Harbor Circuit Left Behind

For five summers the European Grand Prix looped around Valencia's harbor and across a swing bridge, before the circuit fell quiet after 2012.

Valencia's circuit borrowed its setting from a sailing race. The Valencia Street Circuit wrapped around the city's harbor and the port district prepared for the America's Cup, combining existing roads with stretches built only for racing, and Hermann Tilke designed both the track and its buildings. A seven year contract was signed in June 2007, although Spain already held a Grand Prix in Barcelona at the Circuit de Catalunya, and the European Grand Prix arrived on 24 August 2008.

At 5.419 km and 25 corners, the lap was long for a street circuit, and drivers found unusual room and run off for a track in a city. Its signature was a swing bridge some 140 m long, crossed in the slow section around turn 8. A short pit straight fed a flat out first corner and a tight right left past the Grau metro station, and later the turn 17 hairpin beside the Príncipe Felipe science museum provided one of the few decent places to pass. They were few indeed. The straights were never quite straight, dust collected off the racing line, and drivers complained about how hard it was to overtake. Even with DRS in 2011, only five passes were made without it.

Valencia held 5 championship rounds, every one a European Grand Prix, from 2008 to 2012. Felipe Massa won the first from pole, Rubens Barrichello won for Brawn in 2009, and Sebastian Vettel won in 2010 and 2011. Then, at its last visit in June 2012, the circuit produced a race crowded with overtaking, among the most exciting of the season, and Fernando Alonso won it for Ferrari. Valencia had saved its best for last.

A plan to share the Spanish Grand Prix with Barcelona came to nothing, and the circuit was abandoned. The European Grand Prix name lay unused until Baku borrowed it for a single year in 2016.

Every Grand Prix here

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