The Autodromo Riccardo Paletti, also known as Autodromo Varano, is a 1.47-mile (2.36-km) road course in San Martino del Lago, a small Italian municipality of Lombardy, on a 5 hours road trip away from Rome, Italy. Its layout consists of 14 turns intermingled with several straight segments, and it has a very high technical difficulty level for such a short road course. The humid subtropical climate of Lombardy means the track surface tends to be wet year-round, with colder winters and hotter summers than the average. The circuit is oriented counterclockwise on a thin stretch of flat land, extending from east to west rather than north to south.
The start/finish line stands in the southern branch of the circuit, on the middle of the front straight. The drivers find the first challenge right in turn one, the Nuova Variante, a 90-degree right-hander followed by an equivalent left-hander. A short straight comes before Parabolica, the tightest corner leading to another short straightaway. The northern stretch has then 1st and 2nd Esse, which downregulate speed before entering the ICKX Chicane. Four more corners snake to the end of the circuit, in the turns known as Ferro di Cavallo and Tornantino.