Circuit de Nevers Magny Cours

Motorsport track in France

Magny Cours, Deep in Rural France

A racing school circuit in the French countryside held the French Grand Prix for eighteen seasons, and Michael Schumacher won eight of them.

Magny Cours is a long way from almost everywhere, a fact that shaped its whole Grand Prix history. The circuit lies near Nevers and the small town that gave it its name, in central France, about 250 kilometers from Paris and 240 from Lyon. Jean Bernigaud built it in 1960, and it opened that August as the home of the Winfield racing school, whose pupils included Jacques Laffite, Didier Pironi and François Cevert. By the 1980s the track had fallen into disrepair, until the Nièvre departmental council bought it in 1986 and international racing came back. In the 1990s Ligier, and later its successor Prost, made it their base and test track.

The French Grand Prix arrived from Paul Ricard in 1991, and Nigel Mansell won that first race for Williams. The lap is smooth and almost perfectly flat, and many of its corners are named for, and shaped after, famous turns elsewhere: a fast Estoril bend, an Adelaide hairpin, chicanes called Nürburgring and Imola, a greatest hits collection laid in asphalt. The long, quick straight that finishes at that first gear Adelaide hairpin is the best place to pass, but there are few others, and the races gained a reputation as processions. Revisions to the final corner and chicane for 2003 changed little, and the Grand Prix layout since then has measured 4.411 kilometers.

Rain was the great disrupter. In 1999 a downpour halted the race, the leading contenders ran into trouble after the restart, and Heinz Harald Frentzen took an unexpected win for Jordan. Otherwise the place belonged to Michael Schumacher. In 2004 he won with an unprecedented four stops, and his 2006 victory made him the first driver to win the same Grand Prix eight times at one circuit.

The same remoteness kept the crowds small, with difficult access and too few places to stay. Felipe Massa won the last French Grand Prix here for Ferrari in 2008, the 18th championship round at the circuit, and a 2009 race was cancelled when its financing was withdrawn. The circuit stays busy with Superbike and GT racing, houses an engineering college campus and a museum of French single seaters, and hosts the start of a stage of the 2026 Tour de France, a race that has never needed an engine.

Every Grand Prix here

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