Monza Circuit

Motorsport racetrack in Monza, Italy

Monza, Full Throttle Through a Royal Park

Laid out in a royal park north of Milan in 1922, Monza has staged the Italian Grand Prix in every championship season save one.

Monza was racing before most of the world had settled on what a racing circuit was for. It stands among the trees of the Royal Villa park a little north of Milan, the fourth purpose built racetrack anywhere and the first on mainland Europe. Some 3,500 workers raised it between May and July 1922, joining a paved oval to a road course, and that September the Italian Grand Prix came to call. It has hardly left since: in the championship era the only gap was 1980, when the circuit was shut for refurbishment.

A new oval with steeply banked curves opened in 1955, and the championship raced on a combined road and oval lap of 10 km in 1955, 1956, 1960 and 1961. That chapter closed after 1961. On the approach to the Parabolica, Wolfgang von Trips and Jim Clark collided, and von Trips and more than a dozen spectators were killed. No Grand Prix used the banking again, and it still stands in the park, slowly decaying. The circuit has known other losses. Jochen Rindt died in practice in 1970, Ronnie Peterson after a crash at the start in 1978, and in 2000 debris killed the marshal Paolo Gislimberti.

What remains is a lap of long straights interrupted by a few ferocious stops. Chicanes appeared in 1972 and have been reshaped several times, and today's 5.793 km layout has just six corner complexes: the Rettifilo and Roggia chicanes, the two Lesmo bends, the Ascari sequence and the long Parabolica, now named Curva Alboreto. Engines run flat out for close to 80 percent of the lap, and no track on the calendar has been faster since 1991. The cars arrive wearing some of the smallest wings of the year, the motor racing equivalent of traveling light.

The tally now stands at 76 championship rounds, from Giuseppe Farina's victory in 1950 to 2026. Michael Schumacher and Lewis Hamilton share the record with five wins apiece, and Ferrari has won 20 times before a home crowd that keeps careful count. Monza also has a soft spot for newcomers: Sebastian Vettel's first victory came here for Toro Rosso in 2008, and Pierre Gasly's only one for AlphaTauri in 2020. In 2026 Kimi Antonelli won for Mercedes on asphalt relaid in full before the 2024 race. The surface is new; the instruction, go as fast as the trees allow, has not changed since 1922.

Every Grand Prix here

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