Monza Track Guide: A Corner-By-Corner Breakdown

• The outright fastest lap in Formula 1 history, at any circuit, was set at Monza: Max Verstappen’s 2025 pole lap averaged 264.682 km/h, and Monza’s own verified in-race top speed, 370.1 km/h, was set here by Kimi Raikkonen in 2005
• Three Formula 1 drivers have died at Monza during a championship race weekend: Wolfgang von Trips in 1961, Jochen Rindt in 1970 and Ronnie Peterson in 1978, and the circuit’s high-speed banked oval hasn’t hosted a world championship race since that first crash
• Most of Monza’s corners are named for nearby villages, a stream or a vanished hunting lodge rather than racing history, with two notable exceptions: Variante Ascari and Curva Alboreto both carry the names of drivers the circuit lost, one of whom died here

Variante Del Rettifilo: The Chicane That Ends The Fastest Straight

Turns 1 and 2 form the first chicane, a tight right followed by a left that slows cars from well over 300 km/h down to somewhere around 70 to 90 km/h, the heaviest single braking zone on the lap. It wasn’t part of Monza’s original 1922 layout; it was added in 1972 as one of two new chicanes built to slow the circuit down after cornering speeds had risen past what the track’s original layout was designed for. The chicane itself has changed shape more than once since, most significantly in a 2000 redesign that simplified it from a double right-left-right-left combination into a single right-left with a tighter entry.

The corner carries weight beyond its own braking zone. It was the site of the multi-car start crash that killed Ronnie Peterson in 1978, when a bunching field arriving at the chicane collided at the back of the grid. Peterson’s Lotus was launched into the barriers and caught fire; he was pulled from the wreck with severe leg fractures and initially seemed stable, but died the following morning from a fat embolism that developed after surgery, a detail that separates his death from the impact itself.

Curva Biassono: Flat Through The Park

Turn 3, commonly called Curva Grande, is a long right-hander with a radius of around 300 metres, taken at close to full throttle as the track cuts through the parkland surrounding the circuit. It carries the more formal name Biassono, after the nearby village, though Curva Grande, simply “great curve”, is the name almost everyone uses. The corner was realigned in 1995, part of a wider round of safety changes across the calendar that followed the 1994 season, moving its radius around 12 metres further to the inside and opening up a much larger run-off area on the outside. Getting the power down cleanly on exit counts as much here as the entry speed does, since it feeds the run toward the second chicane.

Variante Della Roggia: The Second Brake Test

Turns 4 and 5 form a narrow left-right chicane, approached at around 330 to 335 km/h and taken down to roughly 110 to 120 km/h. It’s named for a nearby roggia, an irrigation stream that runs close to this part of the circuit, and it wasn’t part of the 1972 safety changes at all; it was added later, in a 1976 reconfiguration that came after the Rettifilo chicane had already been revised. Like the first chicane, heavy kerb use here is deliberate rather than incidental, since the chicane’s width invites drivers to use every inch of the exit kerb to carry speed onto the following straight.

Lesmo 1 And Lesmo 2: Named For A Village, Not A Person

Turns 6 and 7, the two Lesmo corners, are both right-handers taken in quick succession, the first with a radius of around 75 metres at roughly 180 km/h, the second tighter, around 35 metres, at closer to 160 km/h. Both take their name from Lesmo, the village adjoining this part of the circuit, though the exact origin of the name itself is debated: some trace it to a local family name, others to the Greek island of Lesbos by way of an old trade route, and older references to the corners as Curva dei 100 Metri or Curva del bosco dei Cervi (curve of the deer wood) have both fallen out of use.

Cars run over lower-than-ideal downforce levels through this section by the nature of a low-drag Monza setup, which makes the two Lesmos a genuine test of a car’s balance rather than a formality between straights.

Between Lesmo 2 and the Ascari chicane, the lap runs through a long, barely-there curve of over 600 metres radius, historically known as Curva del Serraglio. The name comes from a royal hunting lodge that once stood in the forest bordering this stretch of track. It isn’t one of Monza’s eleven numbered corners today, effectively flat out and unremarkable to drive, but the name has stuck in circuit lore even as the lodge itself is long gone.

Variante Ascari: Three Corners, One Name

Turns 8, 9 and 10 make up the Ascari chicane, a left-right-left sequence approached at around 330 km/h and taken through at roughly 200 km/h, a third-and-fourth-gear section with no kerb use, unlike the two chicanes earlier in the lap. It was one of the two new chicanes added in 1972, alongside the Rettifilo, and was itself reshaped again in 1974.

The name commemorates Alberto Ascari, the double world champion who died at this part of the circuit on 26 May 1955, four days after surviving a crash into Monaco’s harbour while leading that race. Ascari wasn’t scheduled to drive at Monza that day; he decided to take a Ferrari sports car out for a few laps ahead of an endurance race he was due to co-drive, wearing a borrowed helmet rather than his own. On his third lap, the car left the road at speed, threw him from the cockpit, and he died within minutes. The corner, then an uninterrupted high-speed curve rather than today’s chicane, was renamed in his honour.

Curva Alboreto: The Long Run To The Line

Turn 11, better known for most of its history as the Parabolica, is a long right-hander of gradually increasing radius, taken from around 180 km/h on entry up toward 330 km/h by the exit, feeding straight onto the pit straight. It was reshaped into its parabolic form in 1955, replacing what had originally been two separate hairpin bends.

It carries two names now. Parabolica describes its shape and remains what most people still call it. Since 11 September 2021, it has also officially been Curva Alboreto, renamed in a trackside ceremony that Saturday, the day of that year’s Sprint race rather than qualifying, which had been held the previous day, in honour of Michele Alboreto, the Milanese driver who won five Grands Prix for Ferrari and Tyrrell before dying in a sportscar testing accident at the Lausitzring in 2001. The corner’s history predates that tribute by decades: it’s where Wolfgang von Trips crashed on the approach in 1961, killing him and 15 spectators in the last world championship race held on Monza’s banked layout, and where Jochen Rindt died in practice for the 1970 race after a right-front brake shaft failure sent his Lotus into an improperly jointed barrier.

The Banking Monza Left Behind

Monza’s 5.793-kilometre road course isn’t the whole story. A high-speed banked oval, built in 1955 with sections reaching gradients steep enough to unsettle cars at speed, once combined with the road circuit to form a 10-kilometre configuration used for the world championship race in 1955, 1956, 1960 and 1961. Drivers chose between an inside and outside lane on the approach to the banking, divided by rubber pylons on the straight.

The banking was never fully trusted. Several drivers reported tyres throwing treads on it during the 1956 race, and the British teams, Cooper, Lotus and BRM among them, boycotted the 1960 Italian Grand Prix over safety concerns, leaving Ferrari to dominate a field missing most of its usual rivals. The banking’s last use came in 1961, when Wolfgang von Trips crashed on the approach to the Parabolica on the second lap, killing himself and 15 spectators. Formula 1 never returned to the oval afterward. It still exists at Monza today, disused and closed to traffic, a physical remnant of a layout the sport walked away from rather than one that was ever formally decommissioned.

Setup, Tyres And Overtaking At Monza

Monza rewards a car that gives up cornering grip for straight-line speed more than almost anywhere else on the calendar. Aston Martin’s Tim Wright, the team’s deputy performance engineer, describes it as “the stand-out track in terms of efficiency: how effectively an F1 car generates downforce whilst minimising drag.” The trade-off is real rather than one-sided: as Wright puts it, “the key at Monza is working out how low you can go in terms of rear wing angle without making the corners extremely painful,” since the two chicanes and the Lesmo pair punish a car stripped too bare for the straights.

Under the 2026 regulations, overtaking assistance no longer comes from a rear-wing-only DRS system. Cars run an active aero setup with two configurations, a high-downforce Z-mode for cornering and a low-drag X-mode for the straights, and X-mode is available to every driver regardless of gap across four zones the FIA has mapped for Monza: the main straight itself, the run from Curva Grande’s exit to the entry of Variante della Roggia, the stretch from after the second Lesmo curve to Variante Ascari, and the run from Ascari’s exit to the entry of the Parabolica. A separate Overtake Mode activates for a pursuing driver within one second of the car ahead on the approach to the Parabolica. It doesn’t cap or limit the leading car at all; every car’s MGU-K runs a standard profile that starts tapering its 350 kW of electrical power from 290 km/h. What Overtake Mode does is give the chasing car an extended window of full deployment right through that band, up to 337 km/h, while the car ahead is already losing power on schedule, and it’s that gap, not any restriction on the leader, that produces the net speed advantage. A driver can combine that window with X-mode and a slipstream into the braking zone for the first chicane.

Monza By The Numbers

The Italian Grand Prix has been held at Monza every year since the world championship began in 1950, with one exception, 1980, when it moved to Imola. As of the 2025 race, Michael Schumacher and Lewis Hamilton share the record for most wins here, five apiece, and Ferrari is the most successful constructor with 20 victories. Hamilton also holds Monza’s records for most pole positions, seven, and most fastest laps, seven, both current as of that same race.

Three distinct lap-based speed records belong to Monza, and they’re often run together in error. The outright fastest lap in Formula 1 history, at any circuit, is Max Verstappen’s 2025 pole lap, 1:18.792 at an average of 264.682 km/h, beating the previous record, also set at Monza, by Lewis Hamilton in 2020 (1:18.887). Monza’s separate race lap record belongs to Lando Norris, set on the final lap of that same 2025 race at 1:20.901, an average of 257.781 km/h, beating Rubens Barrichello’s 2004 mark of 1:21.046. Verstappen won that 2025 race in the fastest Grand Prix ever run by average speed, 1:13:24.325 across 53 laps at 250.706 km/h, beating Michael Schumacher’s 2003 average of 247.585 km/h.

Monza’s own verified top speed in a race is lower than a figure that gets attached to it more often: Kimi Raikkonen reached 370.1 km/h during the actual 2005 Grand Prix, the figure Monza’s own circuit site lists. A higher number from that same weekend, 372.6 km/h by Juan Pablo Montoya, gets cited as a race or Grand Prix record too, but the more reliable sourcing on it points to a private test session rather than the race itself, and it isn’t treated as a competing record here.

The current lap is 5.793 kilometres with 11 corners, seven right-handed and four left, for a race distance of 306.720 kilometres across 53 laps. Pirelli’s own preview for this race puts the pit lane loss at around 25 seconds under green-flag conditions, dropping to about 13 seconds behind a Safety Car on the opening lap.

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Monza Frequently Asked Questions

How many corners does Monza have?

Eleven, most of them named for nearby villages, a local stream or a vanished hunting lodge rather than for sponsors. Two carry the names of drivers the circuit lost, Alberto Ascari and Michele Alboreto, though only Ascari died at Monza itself.

How long is a lap of Monza?

5.793 kilometres.

What is the lap record at Monza?

Two lap records apply, plus a separate speed record often confused with them. The outright fastest lap in Formula 1 history, at any circuit, is Max Verstappen’s 2025 pole lap, 1:18.792. Monza’s own race lap record belongs to Lando Norris, 1:20.901, also set in 2025. Kimi Raikkonen’s 370.1 km/h from 2005 is a top speed, not a lap time, and gets mixed up with the other two more often than it should.

What happened to Monza’s banked oval?

It combined with the road circuit for four world championship races between 1955 and 1961, before Wolfgang von Trips’s fatal crash on the approach to the Parabolica in 1961 ended its use in Formula 1 for good. It’s still there today, disused.

Is the 2026 Italian Grand Prix a Sprint weekend?

No. Monza runs the standard three-practice, qualifying and race format in 2026. Automobile Club d’Italia has confirmed Monza joins the Sprint calendar from 2027, for three seasons.

Why is Monza called the Temple of Speed?

Its long straights and largely flat-out sections make it the fastest average lap on the calendar, a reputation the circuit earned before the current chicanes existed, when the whole lap ran without a single slow corner to interrupt it.

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Written by

Jarrod Partridge

Jarrod Partridge is the Co-Founder of F1 Chronicle and an FIA accredited journalist with over 30 years of experience following Formula 1. A member of the AIPS International Sports Press Association, Jarrod has covered F1 races at circuits around the world, bringing first-hand insight to every race report, driver profile, and technical analysis he writes.

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