Zeltweg

The original home of the Austrian Grand Prix was an uninspiring and bumpy temporary circuit on the active military airfield at Zeltweg in Styria. Set in the Mur valley that is now overlooked by the Red Bull Ring, it was a simple layout with two straights on the concrete runway separated by straw bales. “The paddock was in a vast hangar,” wrote Denis Jenkinson in the October 1964 issue of Motor Sport, “which was fine until someone started a racing engine, and the pits were in the middle of the runway, between the up leg of the course and the down leg.” Jack Brabham won the first Formula 1 Austrian GP – a non-championship race – in 1963 after Innes Ireland retired. The event was granted championship status in 1964 but the surface had deteriorated which caused a high rate of attrition. Lorenzo Bandini’s V6 Ferrari survived long enough for the Italian to record his only such victory. The race switched to sports cars for the next four years before the magnificent Österreichring was built to replace Zeltweg in 1969.