Jeddah Corniche Lap Guide for F1 25: Walls, Kinks, Flat Calls

Jeddah Corniche is the fastest street circuit on the calendar, and in F1 25 it rewards one specific habit: committing to a line you cannot fully see, then leaving it alone. Twenty-seven corners, only a handful of them genuine braking events, and walls close enough that one wheel on the wrong side of an exit kerb ends the run. The lap time here is not hiding in your braking technique. It is in how little you slow for corners that feel like they need it, and in whether your eyes are far enough down the track to commit without a flinch.

The shape of the lap

Think of Jeddah in three parts: a stop-and-go opening through Turns 1 to 4, a long flowing middle of near-flat kinks broken by the banked left at Turn 13, then a technical final sequence from Turn 22 that feeds the main straight.

Budget your attention accordingly. A scruffy Turn 2 costs a tenth and the lap moves on. A scruffy final corner taxes you twice — once in the corner, again down the straight with DRS open. Fix the end of the lap before the start of it.

Turn 1: your one proper stop

You arrive with DRS open and a lot of speed. Brake in a straight line, brake hard, and finish the release early, because Turn 1 is a left that hands you straight into the right of Turn 2. Late rotation here is the classic trap: you make the apex, you feel heroic, and then you reach Turn 2 with the wheel still loaded and no room to switch back. Target a steady minimum speed slightly before the apex, with the car already aimed at Turn 2's entry, and take your reference off the wall-side marker boards rather than the kerb.

Turns 2, 3 and 4

Drive 1-2-3 as one sequence with a single objective: a straight, early exit out of Turn 3 so you can be at full throttle all the way to Turn 4. Do not attack Turn 2's inside kerb to win a few metres of apex — it kicks the car just enough to cost you the switchback, and the switchback is what pays.

Turn 4 is a short, firm brake into a long exit that sets up the first run of kinks. Resist the urge to carry extra entry speed. If you have to wait on the throttle to settle the car, you have already given back whatever you gained.

Seeing through the blind kinks

From Turn 5 onwards the lap is a vision exercise. The walls remove the long sightlines you get on a permanent circuit, apex kerbs appear late, and several kinks do not show you their exit until you are already committed.

The fix is to stop steering to apexes. For every blind kink, pick an exit reference — a gap in the fence, a run-off line, a bridge support — and steer at that. The apex looks after itself. Drivers who hunt the apex kerb on a street circuit make two inputs: one to find the kerb, one to save the car afterwards.

The other half is your hands. Each correction in a kink bleeds speed and loads the tyre before the next kink arrives. Through a run like Turns 14 to 21 you want one continuous steering motion per direction change. If your trace looks like a sawtooth, you are not slow because of the corners — you are slow because you are fighting your own inputs.

Turn 13 and the banked left

The long banked left is the signature corner, and the honest answer to "is it flat?" is: sometimes. On a low-fuel qualifying lap you may hold throttle. In a race stint, with more weight on board, a short lift is usually faster because it keeps the car straight at exit.

Use the banking: run the entry wide, let the banking do the holding, and get your single lift done before you add steering, not halfway through. The test is not whether you survived it; it is whether you exit with the wheel straight and the throttle already pinned.

Making the flat-or-not call properly

Guessing at a blind kink is how runs end against a wall. Work it like this:

1. Drive the kink deliberately slow once, on an out lap, to learn where the wall sits relative to the kerb. Geometry before speed.
2. Add speed one step at a time. Shorten the lift; do not delete it. Going from a half-second lift to full throttle in one attempt tells you nothing except whether you crashed.
3. Judge the result by the corner after it. A flat kink that compromises the next entry is slower than a lifted kink that does not.
4. Read the steering trace before the speed trace. A higher minimum speed with a correction at exit is worse than a lower minimum speed with clean hands.
5. Re-decide per fuel load and ERS state. A kink that is flat in qualifying trim is not automatically flat on lap three of a stint.

Turns 22 and 23

The quick left-right late in the lap is a compromise and you cannot win both halves. Give up entry speed in the first to get the car straight and early on the throttle out of the second, because that exit feeds the closing sequence. Attack the first half and you arrive at the second running wide, and with a wall outside you lift instead of correcting.

The final corner: paying into the straight

The last right-hander is blind on exit with the wall tight outside, and most drivers over-slow it because the wall is intimidating, then compensate by rushing the throttle, run out of road and lift. Net result: slow in the corner and slow on the straight.

Do it the boring way. Brake a touch earlier than feels fast, finish rotation before the apex, then unwind the wheel and feed the throttle in one continuous motion to the exit. Any mid-corner correction here follows you the length of the main straight.

Wall discipline

• Drive to a margin, not to the wall. Half a car width of deliberate buffer on exits costs almost nothing and saves entire runs.
• Treat exit kerbs here as the wall's doorstep, not as extra track.
• If you brush a wall or launch off a kerb, lift and let the car settle. The big hit is almost always the correction, not the contact.

Reading your own data

Jeddah is hard to self-diagnose because the mistakes are small, repeated, and spread across twenty-seven corners. Compare against a reference lap and look at where the throttle traces diverge in the kink sections, how long each of your lifts lasts, and whether your minimum speed in the final corner is costing you the straight. This is also the kind of lap where live help beats charts: P1 (https://takep1.com) is an AI race engineer that reads your telemetry live and coaches the exact corners and braking points costing you time, naming the corner while you are still in the car rather than twenty minutes later.

Racecraft and traffic

Overtaking is realistically Turn 1 and the end of the main straight, so build the move a lap ahead: get the final corner exit right, take the tow, commit to the braking zone. DRS trains form easily here, and chasing a car through the kinks while out of position only ruins your approach into Turn 1. Traffic in the blind sections is the other hazard — a car slowing where you cannot see the exit gives you almost no reaction window, so leave a real gap through the mid-lap flicks instead of sitting on a rear wing.

A practice plan that works

1. Ten minutes on the closing sequence alone — final corner exit and the straight, nothing else.
2. Ten minutes on Turns 1 to 4 as one unit, chasing exit quality out of Turn 3.
3. Ten minutes on the kinks, building speed one lift at a time using the method above.
4. Only then full laps, accepting a tenth lost in sector one for a clean final sector.

Jeddah does not reward bravery. It rewards drivers who know exactly where the walls are and therefore never have to think about them.