A Look at the Washington DC Circuit
- 21 hours ago
- 2 min read
We have recently seen a map of the new Washington DC circuit for the upcoming Freedom 250 Grand Prix, part of the 2026 IndyCar season. Absolute Zero Motorsport had whipped up a short video looking over the circuit, though we have not the resources to render a recreation of the circuit, whether in a racing simulation or otherwise.
Below is one of the maps making its rounds about the internet:
When this was first released on social media, we saw a lot of overly positive comments like "it looks like it will be fast". We presume such notions is based on the straights, but if so they fail to take into account how short these straights are. Between turns 1 and 2 is the longest straight, which we roughly measured to be 2,624 feet in length. After that they get shorter. The next straight we measured at about 662 feet. That's followed by 572 feet, 1,642 feet, 1,284 feet, 542 feet, and finally 1,203 feet. It's unrealistic to expect really high speeds, especially considering the sharp turns will require dramatically reduced speeds, meaning braking earlier and accelerating out of them from a relatively low speed.
The total circuit length is 1.66 miles, which makes it very close to Detroit. We feel that the Detroit street circuit should give us a fairly good idea of what to expect when IndyCar races around the streets of DC. Average lap speeds for Detroit are in the upper 80s to lower 90s miles per hour. Of course, that's the average, so at times they're a fair bit faster, but also in corners they're quite a bit slower.
This particular race is inevitably controversial for political reasons, but we at Absolute Zero Motorsport try to abstain from getting political, so we will simply address this as an IndyCar race and nothing more. While we are skeptical about how this race will ultimately turn out, we love racing and more races is a good thing, so we stand behind its existence.
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