“The grandfather of everything is Jochen, and then obviously with Niki we had
great success in the 1970s and 1980s. They gave a lot of image to motorsport
in Austria. Austria started to like the smell of motorsport’s air at the
time of Rindt and it became a national sport after skiing.”
The whole venue, situated in Spielberg, about 200km from Vienna, has a whiff
of Formula One’s relaxed old school but cannot escape the perfume of its
modern corporatism. Around the brand spanking new facilities, which stand
like the drinks company’s cathedral, beer-fuelled Austrians have flocked to
the small town in their thousands. Apart from their songs by camper van late
into the night, the landscape is peaceful, quiet. Frankly, this race is in
the middle of nowhere. As this writer’s guest house hosts put it: “The pace
of life is very slow here.” The contrast with Monaco and Montreal, the two
previous races, could not be starker.
It is not difficult to see how Austria and motor racing are good bedfellows.
On the two-hour drive down from Vienna even the motorway twists this way and
that through the stunning mountains. Once into the villages you are greeted
by a series of hairpins on tarmac which resemble a hillclimb course more
than a public road.
But however rural and remote this race may feel, the influence of big business
is obvious. Gone is the Niki Lauda curve. In comes the Wurth curve, named
after a German tool company. There is an enormous bull statue in the middle
of the circuit. Even the police are wearing Red Bull tops.
According to Berger, who has known Mateschitz since the mid-1980s, and had a
50 per cent stake in the Red Bull sister team Toro Rosso for a time, it is a
price worth paying.
“The Gerhard Berger curve is also gone,” the 54 year-old jokes. “It is what it
is. I’m not so sensitive about it. It has changed, so whatever.
“It’s a mixture of old and new. The racetrack and the facilities are very
modern, but in the old days we used to race on airfields or where nothing
happens. Today racing is done on street circuits, in cities, or close to
cities, but it is all a little bit different. Everybody feels good here
because it gives a relaxed atmosphere.
“It’s important to have the right mixture. You need traditional races, you
need new races, you need street circuits, you need circuits like this.”
Traditionalists will also be buoyed by Red Bull’s admittedly unsuccessful
attempts to revive some of the fiercest parts of the daunting
Österreichring, used in the 1970s and 1980s. Old hands such a Berger still
speak wistfully of the 150mph Bosch curve but, alas, modern safety standards
would not have it. Barring the chaotic traffic jams of Thursday, however,
the return of F1 to Styria for the first time in 11 years has gone down well.
Berger played his own small hand in bringing the sport back here. “My biggest
role was back in 1985,” he says. “I met Mateschitz for the first time when
Red Bull did not even exist. But he already had this drink in his head and
he asked me if he could use me as a marketing tool. In 1987, he said, ‘we
are ready now, we have created Red Bull’. From this moment on I have been
with Red Bull, and from this moment he invested in motorsport.”
Despite his effusive praise of the drinks giant, however, the often outspoken
Austrian finds the influence of big companies is marginalising lively
personalities like his own.
The man who famously taught Ayrton Senna how to have fun, organising pranks
galore with the Brazilian, says: “I’m missing a little bit the personalities
and I think it was a bit more uncontrolled in my time.
“The biggest thing I’m missing is the personalities of the drivers. They are
great personalities but through big companies coming into the sport with big
budgets it’s not so easy to say what you think. You have to take care about
images, you have to take care about rules. And that’s quite different to my
time. In my time, we could really say things even if we upset the whole
paddock.”
Even if the drivers as personalities can be stymied, the Red Bull Ring has
enough character for its corporate clothing not to put people off. After
all, they rarely if ever do anything half-baked.