There's only a few weeks left in the 2025 F1 season, and it appears that this year will end not with a bang, but with a whimper. An otherwise exciting season for Formula 1's 75th anniversary is hurtling towards an underwhelming finish, not due to any fault of the drivers, but the track itself. Yep, we're going back to Yas Marina.
As usual, the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix will be the final race of the season. While Yas Marina benefits from some grand-finale hype, it has little else going for it. Year after year, this circuit has produced some of the least memorable races.
Yas Marina Offers Little For Fans Or Drivers
Debuting in 2009, Yas Marina was met with mixed responses almost as soon as drivers took to the track. Fernando Alsonso praised the track's unique design, while Giancarlo Fisichella called the pit exit "very difficult and a little dangerous". However, drivers were not the only ones dissatisfied with the circuit.
Yas Marina was a blank canvas; an artificial island with an unlimited budget. It could have been anything. Instead, it ended up being nothing. The design process prioritized fan experience—but only for those in the stands.
Underneath a sprawling hotel, the stands are just footsteps from the world's first Ferrari theme park, and bustling marinas filled with mega-yachts. It's a circuit built for drool-worthy photos and little else. While viewers lucky enough to attend in person may feel the rush, those at home certainly won't.
The first few turns are fun enough, but the circuit soon descends into corners for the sake of having them. Bafflingly, the circuit disrupts the natural flow of a race with artificial challenges and few opportunities for passing. After a few laps, it becomes tedious.
While changes in 2021, such as replacing a notoriously slow chicane, have livened up the track somewhat, Yas Marina continues to lead the pack for dullest course. If it's this boring to watch, we can't imagine how dreary the driving it must be. The cars on this track are some of the fastest in the world, and yet the race feels impossibly slow.
This course leaves little room for technical skill, or even variety. Thanks to Abu Dhabi's highly predictable weather, there's never any chance of natural obstacles providing challenges where the course lacks them. Each year it feels like you tune in to the exact same race, with the cars themselves stuck in a timeloop even as the drivers change.
If it didn't host the final race of the season, we'd forget Yas Marina even exists.
The Elephant In The Room
Lastly, we'd be remiss if we didn't address the gold-plated elephant in the room.
Abu Dhabi, as with the other six emirates that make up the UAE, is extremely wealthy. The UAE is not shy about its wealth, nor are those who visit it. Photos and videos taken on vacation showcase fleets of luxury cars, glittering cityscapes, and gold everything.
The Human Rights Watch has documented the grotesque working conditions that have made the UAE into the ultra-rich playground it is today. 80% of the country's population consists of migrant workers from South Asia and the Arab world. Workers are stripped of their passports upon entry, crammed into squalid housing conditions, and made to work long hours of back-breaking work for pennies.
It's hard to enjoy a race knowing that the track was built using modern slave labor.
In short, Yas Marina is representative of everything wrong with F1's worst circuits. Given a blank check to design any course they wanted, they designed a course that prioritized fan experience while disappointing fans and drivers alike. A floating Ferrari theme park built by people who would be shooed away from touching a Ferrari.
