Madrid's leaders call Madring a zero-cost triumph for the city. A closer look at Ifema's own accounts shows the public sector holding the construction bill and most of the downside risk, while Formula One's owner collects a rising annual fee and keeps the most valuable commercial rights.
On September 13, 2026, Kimi Antonelli won the first Spanish Grand Prix held on Madrid soil, on a 5.4-kilometre street circuit built around the Ifema exhibition grounds in Valdebebas. More than 120,000 people came through the gates across the weekend. Regional president Isabel Díaz Ayuso and Madrid mayor José Luis Martínez-Almeida had spent two years promising the same thing about this race: it would not cost Madrid taxpayers "ni un euro," not one euro.
That claim is the place to start, because it is doing more work than it can bear.
What actually got built, and who paid for it
Madring exists because Ifema Madrid, the region's trade-fair and exhibition operator, bid for and won the hosting rights for the Spanish Grand Prix from 2026 through 2035. Ifema is not a private company. It is a consortium in which the Comunidad de Madrid and the Ayuntamiento de Madrid each hold just under a third of the shares, with the Madrid Chamber of Commerce and the Fundación Montemadrid making up the rest, a structure that leaves roughly 62% of the organisation in public hands, according to reporting by eldiario.es's Somos Madrid.
The circuit's track, grandstands and paddock were built by Acciona and Eiffage under a contract worth just over €83.2 million. That figure, however, is only the headline number. Once the new exhibition pavilions raised alongside the track, legal and advisory costs, and promotional spending are folded in, Ifema's outlay before a single car turned a wheel this year ranges from a verified minimum of €125 million (Newtral) to roughly €183 million (Somos Madrid) to close to €197 million (La Crónica del Henares), depending on which contracts are counted and whether VAT is included. Separately, the neighbourhood platform Stop F1 Madrid, using Ifema's own public tender portal, puts the full 2026 bill (construction, dismantling and temporary walkways included) at €319 million.
The spread between those numbers is the story: nobody outside Ifema has a single, audited figure for what this event costs, because the spending is scattered across dozens of contracts and because Ifema, though majority public, does not report like a public budget line.
The risk the public actually holds
The more revealing number is what Ifema itself says could still go wrong. In its 2024 annual accounts, the consortium flagged a contingent liability of just over €270 million, its own estimate of potential losses if it fails to meet its obligations to Formula One under the ten-year hosting contract. It is management's own disclosure to its auditors, not an outside critic's estimate.
Ifema's hosting fee to Formula One (the "canon" it pays for the right to be on the calendar) has been reported at somewhere between €27.7 million and €48 million a year, depending on the source and the year of the contract. Even at the lower end, that is roughly one and a half times Ifema's entire net profit in 2025. At the reported high end, Madrid is paying nearly double what Barcelona's Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya has historically paid for the same calendar slot. Ifema has not published the exact figure, citing commercial confidentiality, and Stop F1 Madrid says its attempts to obtain the Formula One contract through Spain's transparency law have so far failed.
Ifema's own feasibility study, cited in Somos Madrid's reporting, projects a negative return over the initial 13-year horizon of the deal: a net present value of roughly minus €18 million. The study only turns positive if the land concession underpinning the circuit is extended from 13 years to 30. In other words, the numbers Ifema uses to defend the project internally assume a much longer commitment than the one it has publicly signed.
Who keeps the upside
This is where the ownership question sharpens. Formula One's commercial model, run by Liberty Media since 2017, generally separates two things: a promoter pays a hosting fee for the right to stage a race, while Formula One and its partners keep broadcast rights, trackside advertising and, in most cities, the most lucrative hospitality packages.
Madrid follows that pattern closely. General ticket sales flow to Ifema as the local promoter, and Ayuso pointed to more than €25 million raised from the first 45,000 tickets sold as evidence the event pays for itself. But premium hospitality (the boxes, paddock clubs and VIP packages that carry Formula One's highest margins) sits under a separate ten-year, €400 million agreement with the Swiss firm Match Hospitality, a Liberty Media-linked operator that runs the same function at most other rounds on the calendar. Ifema takes on the construction risk and the ordinary box office; Match and Liberty Media hold the rights that travel with the sport wherever it races next.
That division is how Formula One structures nearly every recent addition to its calendar, in Madrid as elsewhere. What makes Madrid's case worth scrutinising is who is standing behind the promoter absorbing the risk. In Las Vegas, Liberty Media built and owns the circuit itself, putting its own capital behind its own bet. In Madrid, a majority-public consortium built the circuit, carries the construction debt, and reports the contingent losses to its own board, while a private, Liberty-linked company built the ten-year hospitality business on top of it.
The complication
None of this proves the race is a bad bet. Ifema commissioned PwC to model the Grand Prix's economic impact and arrived at a projected €467 million a year in activity and 8,850 associated jobs, though the full study has not been made public. Benito Pérez, an economist with a doctorate in sports economics, told Infobae the initial investment could plausibly be recovered in four or five years even without extending the land concession, a more optimistic read than Ifema's own worst-case feasibility study.
But Pérez's own framing carries the necessary caveat: economic impact is not net profit. A multiplier of nearly four euros of indirect activity for every euro spent counts restaurant meals and taxi fares as part of the return, not money that lands in Ifema's accounts or the region's budget. Montmeló, the Barcelona circuit that has run a Formula One race for more than three decades with steady regional backing, is the sobering comparison: it posted a €3 million loss in 2024 on €42.9 million in revenue, despite more than €200 million in regional subsidies since 2013. A mature, established circuit with none of Madring's startup costs still does not reliably turn a profit on its own. That does not settle what Madring will look like in year ten, but it argues against treating the PwC projection as a floor rather than a best case.
What to watch
The Ayuntamiento and the Comunidad are technically correct that no line in their own published budgets reads "Formula One." But both governments sit on Ifema's board, both appoint roughly a third of its shares each, and both would be exposed if the consortium's own €270 million worst case ever became real. "Zero public cost" describes the accounting, not who is exposed if the bet goes wrong.
Three things will tell readers more than any press release. Whether Ifema ever discloses the actual annual fee it pays Formula One, rather than estimates from opposition parties and neighbourhood groups. Whether the land concession gets extended toward the 30 years Ifema's own feasibility study needs to turn positive, a decision that would quietly lock in another decade and a half of exposure. And whether next year's Ifema accounts show the €270 million contingency shrinking, which would mean the bet is working, or growing, which would mean Madrid's taxpayers are underwriting a Formula One race whose most valuable rights they do not hold.
Notes
- La quimera del “cero gasto público” de la Fórmula 1: los 183 millones de Ifema, el coste en patrocinio y las obras colaterales ↩↗
- Ifema admite un riesgo de 270 millones en sus cuentas por la organización de la Fórmula 1 en Madrid ↩↗
- Cómo se financia la Fórmula 1 de Madrid: IFEMA gasta al menos 125 millones sin apenas gasto público directo ↩↗
- El Gran Premio de España en Madrid tardará en amortizarse entre “cuatro y cinco años”, según un experto en economía ↩↗
- La Fórmula 1 costará este año más de 319 millones de euros a las arcas públicas madrileñas, según un estudio ↩↗
- Plataforma Stop Fórmula 1 Madrid ↩↗
- Madring Wikipedia ↩↗
- Circuito de Madring Wikipedia ↩↗
- MADRING Y SHAKIRA: QUIEN PAGA CADA ESTADIO DE QUITA Y PON. ↩↗
- Madring: el éxito del estreno y la factura pendiente ↩↗
- ¿Quién cobra los 400 euros del ‘césped’ de la F1 en Madrid y por qué? ↩↗
- Un Gran Premio de facturas: lo que la Fórmula 1 le cuesta a Madrid ↩↗