Red Bull Ring

Motor racing track

Three Lives in the Styrian Hills

The same Styrian hillside at Spielberg has hosted the Austrian Grand Prix three times over: as the sweeping Österreichring, the rebuilt A1 Ring and the compact Red Bull Ring.

This patch of the Styrian mountains at Spielberg, in Austria, has been reinvented twice, and has carried three names and three quite different circuits on the same slope. The first, the Österreichring, opened in 1969 to replace the bumpy airfield course at Zeltweg on the far side of the expressway. It was narrow, scenic and almost absurdly quick, a string of high speed sweepers rising and falling 65 meters over a 5.942 kilometer lap, and its banked, downhill Bosch Kurve was the corner drivers feared most.

From 1970, when Jacky Ickx won for Ferrari, the Österreichring held the Austrian Grand Prix every year for 18 years. A crash in 1975 at the Hella Licht Kurve took the life of Mark Donohue, and the corner was later turned into a chicane. In 1984 Niki Lauda won at home, the only Austrian ever to do so, and went on to his third title. By 1987 the narrow pit straight had caused repeated crashes at the start, and Nelson Piquet's pole lap that year set a circuit average speed record of 256.621 kilometers per hour.

Hermann Tilke rebuilt the circuit on the same ground in 1995 and 1996, cutting it to 4.326 kilometers and swapping several sweepers for three tight right handers intended to encourage overtaking. It took the name A1 Ring from the mobile phone company that paid for much of the work, and held seven Grands Prix from 1997 to 2003. Then the pits and grandstands were torn down and the track lay idle for years, until Red Bull's Dietrich Mateschitz paid for its reconstruction. It reopened as the Red Bull Ring in May 2011, and Formula One came back in 2014. Sponsors, it turns out, make excellent godparents.

Today's lap is short, three long straights joined by tight corners and a twisty infield, and since 2019 the first corner has been named for Niki Lauda. In 2020 the circuit opened the delayed season with races on consecutive weekends, the second billed as the Styrian Grand Prix, and it doubled up again in 2021, when Max Verstappen won both from pole. His five wins are the most on this hillside. George Russell won for Mercedes in 2026, the 40th championship round across all three versions of the track, and the mountains have watched every one of them.

Every Grand Prix here

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