Where Is the Baku City Circuit?

The Baku City Circuit is not a place you drive to. It is the middle of Baku, closed off for one weekend a year.

That answer sounds evasive and it is the useful one. People search for the circuit expecting an address, a car park and a gate. What exists instead is a set of ordinary streets that carry buses and taxis for fifty-one weeks, and carry Formula 1 cars for the other one.

The two halves of the track

The circuit has two characters, and knowing which one your ticket puts you in decides almost everything else about your day.

One half runs along the shoreline, beside Baku Boulevard and the Caspian. This is the long, open, fast part. The main straight is here, and the Absheron Grandstand sits beside it. The organiser’s listings put its sections at the start and finish line and at Turn 1.

The other half threads through the old part of the city. The organiser calls the stretch just beyond Turn 8 the castle section, where the road runs beside the medieval walls of Icheri Sheher, the walled Old City. It is the section that makes Baku look unlike any other race on the calendar, and the reason photographs of this circuit are recognisable at a glance.

Those two halves are perhaps a fifteen-minute walk apart at street level. During a race weekend they are much further apart than that, because you can only cross the track where a bridge or an underpass is open.

Getting to it

Three metro stations sit near the circuit. The organiser names them: Icherisheher and Sahil are near the track, and 28 May is 700 metres away. It also says there is no parking for spectators, so buses and the metro are the easy way in.

That is the whole of the published mapping. No official source says which station serves which gate, and pages that tell you otherwise have guessed. Your ticket names your gate, so start with the gate and pick the station on the same side of the track.

A taxi cannot drop you at the gates during the event. The organiser says it can take you to a drop-off location near the track, and you walk the rest over a pedestrian bridge or through an underpass. That walk is longer than it looks on a map.

Visiting when there is no race

You can walk the whole circuit on any ordinary day, and a fair number of people do.

Outside the event it looks like ordinary city streets, because for most of the year that is what it is. What you get is the seafront on one side and the Old City walls on the other, which is a good walk on its own terms.

If you want the drama of the narrow section, go to the Old City gates and follow the wall. If you want the fast part, walk the Boulevard. Both are free, both are open, and neither requires planning.

The 2026 weekend

The 2026 race weekend runs from Thursday 24 September through Saturday 26 September.

Road closures start before the track does. Central streets shut in stages across the days ahead of the first session, and the closures are what actually govern your movements, not the session times. If you are staying inside the closure ring, plan on walking. If you are staying outside it, plan on being dropped further away than you expect.

The circuit in numbers

The organiser publishes the lap as 6.003 km with 20 turns. The race is 51 laps, so 306.049 km in total.

The fastest lap stands at 1:43.009, set by Charles Leclerc for Ferrari in 2019. The highest speed anybody has recorded here is 378 km/h, by Valtteri Bottas for Williams in 2016, which tells you what the shoreline straight is for.

Gate rules, bag limits and permitted items are set by the organiser too, and they change between years. Those we do not restate, because a wrong one costs somebody a gate entry and the official page is one click away.

What we do

We move people to and from the airport and around the closures, which is the part that goes wrong for first-time visitors. Send us your flight number, your dates, the number of passengers and the address you are staying at. We will tell you what is reachable and what is not.