Italian Grand Prix at Monza: September 2026 update
This guide to Monza F1 records has been refreshed for September 2026, and the Temple of Speed’s place in the sport is unchanged. The circuit has featured in every Formula 1 world championship season since 1950, missing only the 1980 edition, when Imola hosted the Italian Grand Prix instead. That run of continuity, spanning more than seven decades, is matched by no other circuit on the current championship calendar.
Monza’s status goes well beyond longevity. It’s the fastest venue in grand prix racing, and its record book tells the story of a track built for speed from the very start. We’ve kept every fact from our original coverage in place, and added a section below that covers Monza’s key records directly.
The origin of the Temple of Speed: 1922 to the banked oval
Monza opened in 1922, built inside the Villa Reale royal park on the edge of the city. It became the third purpose-built permanent racing circuit in the world, following Brooklands in England and Indianapolis in the United States. From the outset, the track combined long straights with a banked oval section, designed to push cars and drivers to speeds no road circuit could match.
The layout has changed a lot since those early years, but the circuit’s core identity has not. For more on how the sport’s early decades still shape racing today, our archive of historical motorsport facts is worth a read.
Tragedy and the end of the banked oval
The banked oval defined Monza’s early identity, but it came at a heavy cost. During the 1961 Italian Grand Prix, Wolfgang von Trips crashed on the banking after his car left the track, and the accident killed him along with 15 spectators. It remains one of the darkest days in the sport’s history.
Following the tragedy, the banked section was dropped from world championship races. Monza settled into the road course layout that, largely, still hosts the grand prix today.
Monza F1 records: Speed, victories and closest finishes
Monza’s F1 records centre on speed, and no circuit on the calendar comes close. Lewis Hamilton set the benchmark in 2020, taking pole position with a lap of 1m18.887s, the quickest qualifying lap in world championship history.
Race pace has been just as extreme. Rubens Barrichello’s win for Ferrari in 2003 was completed at the fastest average speed ever recorded in a grand prix.
Monza has also produced the closest finish Formula 1 has seen. Peter Gethin won the 1971 Italian Grand Prix by a fraction of a second from Ronnie Peterson, the tightest margin the sport has known.
In terms of outright success, Michael Schumacher and Hamilton share the record for the most Monza victories, with five wins apiece. Ferrari, fittingly for the team’s home race, holds the record for the most constructor wins at the circuit.
What happens next
There’s little uncertainty over Monza’s short-term future; its record as an ever-present on the calendar since 1950 speaks for itself, and nothing in the current sporting or commercial landscape points to that changing. What can shift, season to season, is who adds their name to the record books above.
Teams keep chasing performance gains through fine margins, and some of that development traces back to wider motorsport innovation; our piece on performance car technologies looks at how F1 engineering filters down to the road. Whether a driver can lower Hamilton’s pole time, or beat Barrichello’s race speed record, will be settled on track rather than on paper. For now, Monza’s records stand as the clearest measure of how fast this championship has become.
