THE LETTER / MADRID 2026

The race came first.

I began watching Formula One as a child in the 1990s. It reached me from a distance: Sunday broadcasts, magazine photographs and cars that still seemed slightly unknowable. Monza, Spa and Suzuka were places in the imagination long before I understood what it might feel like to arrive there.

This was before access became part of the product and every paddock conversation became content. What stayed with me was the anticipation, the machinery, the geography and the private ritual of a race weekend.

KM0—Kilómetro Cero—comes from that feeling.

It is not another attempt to cover Formula One. Other people do that better. I tend to remember a weekend through its surroundings: the room in the morning, where we ate, the road out of the city and the small thing that came home. The race holds it together. Sunday does not get to own the entire week.

The selection will remain small, personal and verified. A famous place can be wrong. An unfashionable one can be exactly right. I am drawn to order, proportion and things with some history—but never perfection. The best places and objects retain evidence of a life being lived. Elegance becomes more interesting when one thing does not quite behave.

Madrid is Edition One. A new edition can return each year, changing as the race and city change. Other Grand Prix cities may follow, but never as templates. Each place must establish its own rhythm and earn its own point of view.

The race is the excuse. The week is the point.

David Madrid
Madrid, September 2026