As the countdown to the Formula 1 Grand Prix at the Madring circuit accelerates (for the uninformed, it will take place from September 11 to 13 in Madrid), conflicts are increasingly surfacing. Among the many concerns, residents’ complaints about the noise produced by the racing cars have stood out.
Now we know that the judiciary has denied the provisional measures requested by the Association for the Defense of the Environment and by Sustainable Urbanism: they had asked to suspend the Grand Prix license.
A last-minute legal halt is ruled out
As El País details, the decision arrives just as the grandstands and pedestrian routes for the event are being installed: it has been the Administrative-Contentious Section of the Madrid Court of First Instance, Court No. 18, which rejected the ecologists’ petition for a precautionary suspension of the event. This, while the judicial procedure continues in the background.
The reason cited by the court is that suspending the Grand Prix license would harm “a large number of people who are fans of motorsport” and would cause “a grave disruption of the general interests”.
In this case, the interests of nearby residents at the Valdebebas circuit are set aside, those who fear that the event will diminish their quality of life due to noise, tremors, air pollution and the heat emanating from the cars. According to the non-certified measurements carried out by the neighborhood platform Stop Formula 1, the noise from the single-seat cars exceeds 107 decibels, when the regulations allow a maximum of 35.
In its defense, the Madrid City Council’s delegate for Urban Planning, Mobility and Environment, Borja Carabante, has asserted that the noise from the Formula 3 cars that were running on the track during a two-day test phase is much louder than what will occur during the event days, and that acoustic measures will be installed to mitigate the noise.
