Gaudí must be rolling over in his grave. A Formula 1 race car burning rubber and making noise before one of his works for no reason is, I’m sure, something he would disapprove of. Oh wait, there is a reason: making a public spectacle for tourists and suburbanites. Never mind that there’s a perfectly fine F1 race track outside Barcelona for these sorts of activities. No, our esteemed new mayor decided that the very city center had to be the site of this testoreronic and moronic display. The reason is obvious: mayor Jaume Collboni wants to be seen as the antithesis of the previous mayor, Ada Colau, who succesfully reduced air pollution in the city by calming traffic on many of its streets. What better way than to stick it to the previous mayor and appease her many haters by putting on an F1 road show?
To site this sorry spectacle on a street named “Passeig de Gracia” (passeig = paseo = walk) is to issue nothing short of a manifesto in favor of muscle cars and fossil fuels, which in the end means to deny climate change, of course. This is the same supposedly “socialist” mayor who wants the airport to expand so that more tourists come and visit (and so that more fossil fuel pollution is produced locally), and who is in favor of privatizing public space in El Raval, the most densely populated square kilometer in Europe.
This is just a one-day, once-in-a-blue-moon event, to be sure; a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of traffic in this city every day. But it’s highly symbolic, and in politics, symbolism is everything. This road show says: “welcome back motor cars and motorcycles!” And sure enough, in the days following the road show, more cars and motorcycles were revving their engines, screeching their tires, and driving like assholes in celebration of the mayor’s manifesto.
Well, at some point soon this pro-fossil fuel position is going to backfire, politically speaking. The leading cities in the world are reducing traffic lanes (look no further than Paris), expanding bike lanes (eg. New York City), and eliminating minimum parking requirements (eg. Montreal). But not Barcelona, which was in that fine company but is now in the club of ass-backward cities that need to put on riculous road shows to grab attention. Pathetic.
Criticalista 
And the noise, the acoustical pollution! Barcelona is SO noisy, yet nobody seems to care.
I care. As do many others who were disgusted and outraged by the obscenity of such an event being staged in the city center, on the city’s finest boulevard no less. But you’re right, along with automobile pollution, the city has a serious noise problem.