For F1 drivers, Monaco’s swimming pool corner requires pure driving skills

Brightly colored flashes shoot across what is normally a sidewalk. They emit a smell of hot engine parts and lubricants and rattle loudly as they race over a white-red stone strip a little further on. Dust kicks up as they pass.

This is the place where the Monaco circuit squeezes around the local fifty-meter pool. The ‘swimming pool chicane’ is the fastest corner on the circuit and this Friday afternoon, during their first hour of training, the Formula 1 drivers find the courage to go faster through the S-shaped asphalt bend little by little.

The Monaco Grand Prix, where the sixth Formula 1 race of the season is scheduled this weekend, is perhaps the most criticized of all. The tight street circuit is no longer suitable for today’s heavy F1 cars, which can hardly overtake each other. Last year’s race turned out to be an excruciatingly boring parade with just one passing maneuver. It was high time for Formula 1 to say goodbye to Monaco, was the sentiment among many fans.

But most critics probably never see F1 cars with their own eyes through the pool chicane racing, almost ten times as fast as regular traffic normally drives, inch by inch closer to the guardrail. It is the corner that best shows the challenge and absurdity of racing in Monaco – and thus also underlines the unique value of the circuit.

In the cockpit it all comes down to determination and courage. First you enter the marina from the tunnel and turn left at the tabac bend in front of a colossal grandstand. Accelerating towards 250 kilometers per hour looms single guardrail on. “Until you get to the intersection, you drive blind,” says Charles Leclerc, the Ferrari driver who was not only born and raised in Monaco, but also won the grand prix there in 2024. “You can’t see around the bend, and that’s the exciting thing about it.”

Get through in one piece

Just as pilots fly on their instruments in dense cloud, drivers use reference points to get through the pool chicane in one piece without visibility. Enter from the very right side of the lane, just after the orange piece of guardrail that indicates where there is a hard shoulder for broken down cars. And then aim for the beginning of the curbstone on the left side of the track – that is exactly where you want to reach the guard rail with your left front wheel.

Then the rest of the bend reveals itself: a bend in the asphalt to the right, slightly sharper than the left bend. At least on paper. The ideal racing line dictates that you put the steering wheel almost straight after the tight approach point at the crash barrier on the left, so that you automatically cross the track to the right, towards the second approach point of the chicane. Do you hit the curbstone there just after the middle, then you will be in good shape for the last few tight, technical corners before the finish.

Brakes? That’s not necessary. Keeping the pedal to the metal is the starting point in the pool chicane. The drivers are through the bend in less than a second.

On the spot, the left-right swing that the cars make is somewhat reminiscent of images of UFOs changing direction at impossible speeds. While the drivers move their cars from one to the other curbstone dragging, it seems as if the laws of nature do not apply for a moment.

There is nothing mysterious about the way the drivers achieve this: it is due to the enormous power (downforce) with which the wind pushes their cars against the ground via the wings. However, something has changed this year. The new technical regulations have numerous restrictions, which have significantly reduced the amount of downforce.

That could make the swimming pool chicane more difficult, thinks Valtteri Bottas. “You always went through it easily at full throttle,” says the Finnish Cadillac driver a day before the F1 drivers are allowed onto the circuit for the first time. This year he doesn’t know yet whether that will be possible again. “You now have to be a lot more precise in those kinds of high-speed corners.”

Nico Hülkenberg, a German who drives for Audi, does not expect Monaco to become much more challenging with the new cars. When he hears that Bottas thinks differently, he responds with a teasing laugh: “If [je auto] you don’t have the grip, you have to get off the gas. I mean, it’s simple physics.”

Haas’ Ollie Bearman doesn’t know it all yet on Thursday. “It depends on your car,” says the Brit. “I’ll let you know after the weekend.”

Twenty-two hours later, the twenty-two cars pass through the swimming pool chicane for the first time. Sergio Pérez leads the way in his black and white Cadillac. The first time he takes it easy. The second too. But the third time his speed is already visibly higher.

This is how all drivers slowly build up their rhythm in Monaco. If you make a mistake, there is a good chance that you will end up in the guardrail. But in the swimming pool chicane the engine roar continues to drop slightly towards the end of the training session. Unlike last year, the drivers have to use their accelerator raise it a few millimeters.

So Bottas was right, at least for the time being. During the weekend the teams fine-tune their cars and the drivers gain more and more confidence. “In the first part of the weekend [de zwembadchicane] probably a real turn again,” Leclerc said on Thursday. “But I think we will go full throttle again later in the weekend.”

Helicopter shots

As you cross the pit lane from the Cadillac garage and climb over a knee-high guardrail, you immediately find yourself at the top of a metal staircase that provides access to the pool a few feet below. A breeze ripples the water surface, which now contains meters of white letters that form the logo of Formula 1’s champagne sponsor – good for helicopter shots.

During the Grand Prix weekend, Monaco gives the impression of a suitcase that is far too full of clothes. The swimming pool chicane, a mega grandstand, the pit lane, the pit building and the start/finish straight are successively crammed into a strip of about eighty meters from the water’s edge.

That crowd is also the reason that the swimming pool chicane exists in the first place. In the early decades of the Monaco Grand Prix, first organized in 1929, the event was a much smaller affair, with a simple pit under the shady trees along Boulevard Albert 1er, where the finish is located. But as the sport professionalized in the early 1970s, those spartan facilities were no longer sufficient. The only way to create space for better pits was to move part of the circuit – exactly towards where the swimming pool was built in the early 1960s. The swimming pool chicane became part of the course from 1973 onwards.

More than half a century later, a firefighter and a doctor paced back and forth behind the guardrail at that spot. Across the track, a man sits with his elbow out of the window of a tow truck. Elsewhere there is a jack, fire extinguishers, brooms, bolt cutters.

A crash happened in the swimming pool chicane. You only have to be a little bit off your reference point and you will end up in the wrong direction or lose control of your car. The blow that follows is often hard. Request it Mick Schumacher and Alex Caffi, who have their cars by the pool drove through the middle. Or Nico Rosberg, raised in Monaco, who was there in 2008 one of his worst crashes had, but was able to walk away on his own. This did not apply to Vitali Petrov, who had to be taken to hospital in 2011 with numb legs after had landed hard into the guardrails.

Crane above wreck

It will remain quiet this Friday. That is to say: in this part of the swimming pool section. The fast swimming pool chicane leads a little further to a second swimming pool chicane – a small, slower one, which allows the course to neatly surround the swimming pool. Max Verstappen crashed there a few times, and now it is his teammate Isack Hadjar who drives his Red Bull into the crash barrier. Even before he has gotten out, a crane is already hanging above to lift away the wreckage.

Only news for the Frenchman, who will now be able to complete fewer practice laps, and will therefore be able to build up less feeling for how close he can get to the barriers. While this is precisely crucial for qualifying on Saturday, perhaps the finest example of driving skills from the Formula 1 season, where the front wheels sometimes hit the fence getting so close that they scrape off the advertising stickers.

Zoom in

Enthusiasts do not have to fear that the spectacle will be less this year due to the controversial semi-electric engine rules, which normally force drivers to take it easy during their qualifying laps to recharge their batteries. However, in Monaco there is so much braking and the straights are so short that the battery is continuously sufficiently replenished. It is therefore not necessary to deliberately let the car roll out quietly, Max Verstappen confirmed on Thursday in the Red Bull team building. Will Monaco bring back the driving pleasure that was evaporated by the new cars? Not really. “I’m not a fan of street circuits.”

This is different for most of his colleagues. Driving a qualifying lap in Monaco with full concentration, taking all the risks while being one finger away from a crash – and now daring to take the swimming pool chicane at full throttle – remains the ultimate racing experience for them.

“I remember that [bij mijn eerste keer Monaco in 2019] got out after training and was shaking with adrenaline. It was only last year that I had less of that for the first time,” says Williams driver Alexander Albon. “I don’t think there is another circuit where it is so nice to […] to step out of your comfort zone for those one or two rounds in qualifying. I don’t get that feeling anywhere else.”

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