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Red Bull Ring, Spielberg, AustriaF1 returns to the European mainland and Red Bull's home race for the Austrian Grand Prix.
Formerly known as the A1-Ring, the Red Bull Ring nestles in a natural bowl amongst the Styrian mountains at Speilberg.
The track is scenic, with opportunity for many fans, in years that they are allowed, to camp at the site and the TV shows usually include at least one article with the pundits sampling some “German Sausage” outside a caravan with Ferrari-coloured children and an overweight man in lederhosen.
The Red Bull Ring is characterised by fast flowing corners and steep changes of elevation. Overtaking is quite hard due to the narrowness of the track and the flow of the corners.
One of the first circuits to be redesigned by our old friend Hermann TilkeAn Austrian architect who designs race tracks in his spare time and wears incredibly expenive frameless glasses,
Red Bull Ring is officially a ten turn circuit, with that tiny kink at the end of the first DRS zone now being somewhat laughably called “Turn 2even a road car could take this flat out”,
but in terms of today's car, it is actually just seven corners, or braking events, making it one of the simplest on the tour.
It is also the shortest, meaning that the hybrid power units have limited opportunity to build up a store of battery energy, and in particular the cars with less efficient ERSEnergy Recovery Systems, mostly in the braking will suffer.
The first corner is a sharp 90° bend with a limited run-off, so the drivers have to wait until they get on the power for a long uphill through the first DRSDrag Reduction System, where they can open the rear flap and gain speed zone
before braking into the tight Turn 3, then roll over a change in camber and a second fast DRS run towards the slow Turn 4 as the track turns downhill and into a more classically flowing mid-section.
Turns 5–7 have grass and gravel traps that require care not to come off the line and beach the car,
but then there is short burst of speed into the two final quick corners of Turns 9 & 10 before re-entering the pitlane straight.
The Red Bull Ring is a fast track with a very short lap, so small errors can damage the time in qualifying, while the corners require a lot of mechanical grip from the tyres, meaning that tyre degredation is a factor in the race.
The kerbs are notoriously vicious; even though for an F1 weekend the high sausage kerbs, designed to enforce track limits, are removed but the close nature of the circuit means that cars must use all the kerb available to maximise cornering efficiency, and even the remaining red and white striped kerbs, of which there are many (it is Austria, after all), can literally shake a car to bits.
| Thursday | Friday | Saturday | Sunday | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Press Day | FP1 | FP2 | FP3 | QLY | RACE 15:00 | |
| Predicted weather for today's race: | 30°C |  | ||||
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| Dry Tyre Compounds | ||||
| Hard × 2 | Medium × 3 | Soft × 8 |  C3 (midrange) |  C4 (soft-ish) |  C5 (soft) |