Don’t You Dare Get Rid of Monaco
I’m still telling you to keep your hands off Formula 1’s most boring, most beautiful, most pointless race.
Somewhere between the casino and the sea, a Formula 1 car bursts out of a tunnel at 180 miles an hour, daylight detonating in the driver’s eyes, and threads itself between two steel barriers with about the room you’d leave a shopping cart in a tight garage. No gravel trap. No acres of forgiving tarmac. No second chances. Graze the wall and your weekend becomes a pile of carbon fiber and a long, quiet walk back to the garage…or a yacht if you’re Kimi Räikkönen.
Seventy-eight times on Sunday. The most laps on the calendar, around the shortest, slowest, narrowest track in the sport. Add it all up, and the race covers about 260 kilometers, short of the 305 every other Grand Prix has to clear. The sport bends its own rulebook to keep this one.
And I already know exactly what you’re going to say, because everyone says it.
The race is boring.
You’re right. Let me say it louder than you will. I have sat through Monaco Grands Prix where the single most dramatic event was a slow pit stop, turned to whoever was in the room, and called it a masterpiece. I was lying. Overtaking here ranges from heroic to impossible. In all of 2025, under a brand-new rule forcing everyone to pit twice, the entire race saw only one legal overtake. One. Zero inside the top ten. Mercedes ran the numbers: to have even a coin-flip’s chance of passing the car ahead, you needed to be four and a half seconds a lap quicker.
That car doesn’t exist.
Max Verstappen took one look at the 2024 edition and got on the radio to say it was so boring he should have brought his pillow. Even Will Buxton, who loves the place, says the quiet part out loud: “The racing itself has never been great in Monaco.” Not lately. Not ever.
So here’s my confession, and then my line in the sand.
I make my living looking forward. By temperament and by paycheck, I am the last guy on earth who should be defending a traffic jam invented in 1929 off the coast of a tax haven.
But if you come for Monaco, I will fight you in the street.
Let me give you the why, because “tradition” is a lazy answer, and you deserve better than that.
Over the last few decades, Formula 1 has gotten safer, and thank God for it. It also got softer. The sport sanded down its corners and paved over its mistakes until a screw-up costs you a few tenths and a frown from your engineer. Run wide at most modern tracks, and you’ll find a parking lot of smooth asphalt waiting to catch you, dust you off, and hand you back. The walls moved away. Danger became a number on a screen.
Monaco never got the memo. Monaco kept the wall.
That’s the whole argument, and it lives on Saturday.
Because the secret about the crown jewel is that the jewel is qualifying. Sunday is a coronation. The pole lap is the achievement. One driver, one car, one lap, no margin, no help, the barrier a hand’s width from the wheel at every apex and a guillotine at every exit. Get it wrong, and you don’t lose a few tenths, you lose the car, the weekend, the skin off your knuckles. Fernando Alonso calls it “the best Saturday of the year,” all adrenaline and fun behind the wheel, then admits the race itself “can be a little bit boring.” Daniel Ricciardo said it better than the rest of us could: “It’s so awesomely scary and beautiful and insane and intense.”
And nobody ever drove that edge like Ayrton Senna in 1988.
He was already on pole. Job done, feet up. Instead, he kept going, and the lap kept getting faster, until he was a second and a half clear of Alain Prost in the identical car. His own words, because no one has ever described the inside of greatness better than this:
“Suddenly, I was nearly two seconds faster than anybody else, including my teammate with the same car. And suddenly I realized that I was no longer driving the car consciously. I was driving it by a kind of instinct, only I was in a different dimension. It was like I was in a tunnel.”
Not the tunnel under the hotel. The whole circuit had become a tunnel. He scared himself so badly that he backed off and came in. A man drove clean past the edge of his own mind, and the only sane thing left to do was stop.
Then Monaco did what Monaco does. On Sunday, he led that race by almost a minute. Untouchable. On lap sixty-seven, mind drifting out front, he kissed the barrier at Portier and threw the whole thing away. He didn’t drive back to the pits. He walked to his apartment and didn’t come out for hours. The same wall that crowned him on Saturday swallowed him on Sunday.
You cannot fake that. You cannot bolt it onto a sprint race, a DRS zone, or a fan vote. It exists for one reason. The walls are real.
In 2024, a kid named Charles Leclerc, who grew up on those exact streets and spent his childhood looking down at that circuit, won his home Grand Prix and broke down on the radio, the first Monégasque to win it since Louis Chiron in 1931. You don’t get that in a parking lot in the desert. You can’t build it or buy it. It happened because a hundred years of the same impossible streets were still standing there, waiting for him.
This is why I’ve started calling Monaco the cathedral that the sport refuses to renovate. Everything else in Formula 1 sprints into the future. Aero by the millimeter, strategy by the algorithm, a calendar stuffing itself with shiny new street circuits built to look like Monaco the way a casino buffet is built to look like Italy. The machine runs flat out, forward, always. And then, once a year, it stops, takes off its hat, and drives the same lap it has since a Bugatti piloted by a man racing under a fake name won the first one. Graham Hill won it five times, and they called him Mr Monaco. Senna won it six. The track has barely moved. The royal family still watches from the same box.
Because I optimize everything. So do you. We sand the friction off our days, automate the dull parts, A/B test the wonder until it converts. The one move that keeps a person from vanishing into all that smoothness is to plant a flag on something gloriously, stubbornly inefficient and refuse to fix it. A manual gearbox in a world that shifts for you. A long lunch with no agenda. A race that flatly declines to be a good show, kept exactly because keeping it is the meaning.
So to whoever’s drafting the next proposal to take Monaco off the calendar or widen the hairpin, please, put the pen down. That corner is the slowest in the sport already, twenty-eight miles an hour at the apex, and it has never once needed your help. They ran the experiment last year. The two-stop rule was the fix, and it led teams to order one car to back up the field so the other could escape into clean air. Gone by 2026, struck from the book inside twelve months. You’re trying to fix the one race that was never broken. The procession is exactly what it’s supposed to be. The boredom is the price of admission to the only test left in the sport where a mistake still costs a human being something real.
Keep your new circuits. I’ll watch those too. I want both, the way I always want both.
Just leave the walls where they are. Leave Monaco alone.
Formula 1 is always going to chase “tomorrow”, but Monaco is the one Sunday a year it remembers it was always about a person, a machine, and a hand’s width of empty air.
Don’t you dare get rid of it.
