Formula One held its first official Austrian GP back in 1964 which turned out to be the first and only win for Lorenzo Bandini, driving for Scuderia Ferrari.
The Austrian race in its current guise returned to the calendar in 2014, along with the hybrid cars. A favourite with the fans because of the atmosphere and the great view, the Zeltweg track, or more correctly, Spielberg, is one of the shortest on the calendar in terms of distance and in time taken for a lap, half of which is spent at full throttle.
There are nine corners in total, a mix of hard braking and fast curves, with endless changes of gradient.
For this race, the tyres will be the softest available: Soft, Supersoft and Ultrasoft, that's as long as the rain tyres are not required and, at the moment, the weather forecast for the weekend is still uncertain.
But, despite the threat of rain, Kimi Raikkonen is quite keen to get back to work on the 4.3 km Austrian circuit…
“I like the layout of this track: it doesn't have many corners, so the lap time is quite short and everybody is quite close in qualifying,” he explained. “It's not easy to make predictions for the weekend, even if, in the past this track has been quite good for us but obviously, with the new rule changes, you never know."
"I think that our car should be fine, we have been pretty strong everywhere so far. We are quite confident that wherever we go and in whatever conditions we can be up there. The end result obviously depends on many things, we'll see how it goes but we should be ok”.
