FORMULA 1 ITALIAN GRAND PRIX

The Italian Grand Prix is three days of Formula One in early September at the Autodromo Nazionale Monza, in the royal park of Monza, north of Milan: practice on the Friday, qualifying on the Saturday and the race on the Sunday afternoon, fifty-three laps of a circuit of 5.793 kilometres among the trees. It has been run in every season of the World Championship since 1950, one of only two Grands Prix, with the British, to have done so.

Monza has been the fastest track on the Formula One calendar since 1991. The engines are at full throttle for nearly four-fifths of the lap.

The Royal Park

The first Italian Grand Prix was run on 4 September 1921, on a road circuit of 10.7 miles near Montichiari. It is the fifth oldest national Grand Prix in motor racing. The Milan Automobile Club paid for a permanent track in the Parco di Monza, a public park, largely wooded, where the Royal Villa of Monza also stands. Three thousand five hundred workers built it between May and July 1922. Vincenzo Lancia and Felice Nazzaro laid the last two bricks, and the track was opened on 3 September 1922; the second Italian Grand Prix was run on it a week later. It has been called the Temple of Speed ever since.

The race has not always been at Monza. It went to Livorno in 1937, to Milan in 1947, to Turin in 1948 and to Imola in 1980, and was not run at all in 1929 and 1930. Nor has Monza been kind. In 1928 Materassi’s Talbot went into the grandstand, killing him and twenty-seven spectators; in 1933, on the Black Day of Monza, Campari, Borzacchini and Czaykowski were killed; and in 1961 von Trips and more than a dozen spectators died at the approach to the Parabolica.

The banked oval was rebuilt in 1954 and 1955, and in 1955, 1956, 1960 and 1961 Formula One raced over the combined course of ten kilometres, road and banking together. Phil Hill won there on the combined course. The banking survives, among the trees of the park.

In 1971 Gethin beat Peterson by “one-one hundredth of a second”, in what was then the fastest Formula One race ever run. In 2008 Vettel, at twenty-one years and seventy-four days, became the youngest winner of a Grand Prix. Schumacher and Hamilton have each won here five times, and Ferrari has won its home race twenty times, most recently with Leclerc in 2024. The race is due at Monza until at least 2031.

The Weekend

The lap runs from the pit straight through the Curva Grande, Lesmo and the Variante Ascari to the bend once called the Parabolica, now the Curva Alboreto, and back onto the straight. In 2025 Verstappen took pole at an average of 264.681 kilometres an hour, the fastest lap ever recorded in qualifying for a World Championship event.

Practice is on the Friday, the last practice and qualifying on the Saturday, and the race starts at three on the Sunday. The crowd is the tifosi’s. Formula One’s own account of the race says: “There are passionate crowds, and then there are the Tifosi,” and the grandstands are “a sea of Ferrari red”.

When the race is over the gates to the track are opened, and “spectators fill the main straight beneath the podium”.

In 2026, on 6 September, Pierre Gasly took the first pole of his career and of Alpine’s. The race was stopped after three laps when Leclerc crashed at the Parabolica. Kimi Antonelli, nineteenth on the grid, won it for Mercedes, the first Italian driver to win the Italian Grand Prix since Ludovico Scarfiotti in 1966, with Russell and Verstappen behind him. 403,666 people came over the four days the circuit counts, a record.

What to Know

It runs from the Friday to the Sunday in the first week of September: in 2027, from 3 to 5 September, with a Sprint.

Tickets for 2027 went on general sale on 24 September 2026. They are sold for general admission, for the grandstands, for VIP hospitality and for the Formula One Paddock Club; prices are shown only in the booking system.

Smart casual. Nothing is published, and the Court’s version is a jacket without a tie, proper trousers and proper shoes, and no logos. The race is run in the heat of early September, and the day ends with a walk through a park.

Milan Malpensa is about fifty minutes from the circuit. Trains run from Milano Centrale and Porta Garibaldi to Monza in ten to twelve minutes, and from Monza station it is a shuttle and a walk of a quarter of an hour through the park, or half an hour on foot. Paddock Club guests drive in by Gate A, Vedano. Milan is about forty-five minutes away by road: the Park Hyatt or the Hotel Manin, or the Villa d’Este on Lake Como. The Hotel de la Ville is in Monza itself, and the town’s rooms go fast and dear on race weekend.

The mistake is to make straight for the station after the flag. Queues of an hour to an hour and a half are standard. Go onto the track with the crowd instead, or wait half an hour in the park.

The Court

The Italian Grand Prix is not the Court’s own. Seats in a grandstand over the main straight, or a place in the Paddock Club, are sought on a member’s behalf, and the Court arranges the whole of it: getting there, where to stay in Milan, on Lake Como or in Monza, and the table afterward.

How one becomes a member is set out under Admission.