Spielberg

The Red Bull Ring sits in farmland above the town of Spielberg, grandstands cut straight into the green Styrian hills, and the whole circuit takes barely over a minute to lap, one of the shortest on the calendar, so the cars come past again before the last set has left your ears. This is Red Bull's home race, and the crowd treats it that way: cowbells in the grandstands, the hills full of people who have driven a long way for it. The rest of the year it is quiet, agricultural, green; for one weekend it is the loudest valley in Austria. The contrast is the point.

We fly here because the Austrian Grand Prix is one of the great weekends in sport and almost nobody arrives at it well. A race this good deserves better than a five-hour crawl off the hillside with eighty thousand other cars the moment the chequered flag drops. The hard part has never been the race; it's everything around it, and that is exactly the part worth solving. Be in the hills for the cowbells, and home before the car park has cleared.