Event
The Formula 1 engineer’s guide to the 2025 Austrian Grand Prix at the Red Bull Ring
by Raceteq
4min read
The 2025 Austrian Formula 1 Grand Prix takes place at the Red Bull Ring situated in the Styrian Alps, with Formula 2 and Formula 3 returning this weekend. Here’s how to get the most out of the shortest lap on the F1 calendar.
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The fastest F1 teams take just over a minute to lap the Red Bull Ring, with Carlos Sainz having set the lap record with a time of 1m05.619s in the 2020 Styrian Grand Prix - the second race to have taken place at the Red Bull Ring in that Covid-hit season.
Despite its short laptime, the Red Bull Ring is the fifth-shortest circuit on the 2025 F1, F2 and F3 calendars - underlining just how many high-speed sections there are on this track.
This weekend, Pirelli has nominated the C3 as the hard tyre, the C4 as the medium tyre, and the C5 as the soft tyre. These three compounds are one step harder than those nominated in the previous race at Montreal, and one step softer than the next race at Silverstone.
Aston Martin Aramco Formula 1 Team deputy performance engineer Tim Wright explains the characteristics that set this Styrian circuit apart from the rest.
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Pirelli's preview of the 2025 Austrian Grand Prix at the Red Bull Ring
Red Bull Ring, Austria
Length: 4.318 kilometres
Number of laps: 71
Number of turns: 10
Tim Wright: “Austria is really a standout in terms of the amount of high-speed cornering it's got. There are some absolute stinkers in Austria: the sharp right-handers of Turns 3 and 4.
“Then you’ve got the double-left hander of Turns 6 and Turn 7 - Turn 8 is not really a corner - and Turns 9 and 10, the last two corners.
“They’re all really high-speed, short duration corners after Turn 4 but you can’t just set the car up to nail those corners, because you have to take into account Turn 3, which is very low speed.
“It comes back to warp, something I talked about in Monaco, because there’s a lot of warp on this track. The four wheels are all doing very different things - they’re all rarely in contact with the track at the same time - because at the apex of some of the turns the road comes up to meet the front-right tyre and destabilises the car.
“Ultimately, it is a high-speed corner and the straights are just long enough that you do have a decision to make on downforce.
The uphill right-hand corner that is Turn 3 in Austria
“You can't just go with maximum rear wing but you will be on a setting that we would call medium-high or high-downforce [for the] very high-speed corners.
“And the other thing is that this lap is a very short duration. It’s not necessarily set-up, but timing you have to consider; Austria is an absolute disaster when it comes to traffic in qualifying.
“You've got such a short lap with all the cars on it, and they're all going so fast, that finding your gap is so important.
“From an engineering point of view, it adds that challenge, it’s a bit like Monaco in some ways.
“You've got this extra dimension of not being able to just throw the car out on track and hope for the best.
“And of course, being in traffic in all those high-speed corners is the worst thing in the world.”
