Albert Park Circuit

Street circuit in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Albert Park, a Racetrack in a Park

For most of the year it is a lakeside park road where black swans set the pace; once a year it becomes the home of the Australian Grand Prix.

Black swans sometimes hold up the traffic on Lakeside Drive, leading their cygnets across a road that, for roughly nine months of the year, anyone may drive in either direction at 40 kilometers per hour. This is Albert Park Circuit, a loop around Albert Park Lake just south of central Melbourne, where the water is what remains of a lagoon left by an ancient course of the Yarra River. Fences, footbridges and grandstands start rising about three months ahead of the race, and within nine weeks of it they are gone.

The park's racing history runs deeper than its modern look suggests. It was the Light Car Club of Australia's doing that brought the Australian Grand Prix here in 1953, on a counterclockwise course that held six meetings before closing in November 1958. When the race returned in 1996 as a World Championship round, the roads had been rebuilt, which is why the surface is far smoother than on most street circuits, and Damon Hill won that first one for Williams. No other venue has hosted the Australian Grand Prix both inside and outside the championship.

A lap feels like two kinds of circuit at once. The corners have the medium and high speed rhythm of a permanent track, with grass and gravel run off laid again each year, but along the Lakeside Drive curve the shoreline leaves room only for concrete walls. Drivers call it fast and quick to learn; overtaking has been harder to master, given the flat terrain and the lack of real straights. After the pandemic wiped out the 2020 and 2021 races, the layout was revised for 2022: the pit lane and several corners were widened, Turn 13 was reshaped, and Turns 9 and 10 vanished to make one longer fast stretch. Today's lap is 5.278 kilometers.

Michael Schumacher won here four times, the record, and Ferrari's ten wins lead the teams. The crowds are vast, a record 452,055 across the 2024 weekend, and the race is under contract until 2035. When George Russell won the 2026 opener for Mercedes, it was the 29th championship round held around the lake, which goes back to the swans once the barriers come down.

Every Grand Prix here

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