Thursday, media day at the Red Bull Ring. Traditionally the quietest day of the Grand Prix weekend. Drivers sit down for interviews and the PR ladies of the teams are constantly on the move with tight schedules. Normally, the press room buzzes with rumors about updates, grid penalties, and team unrest. But yesterday, it wasn’t paddock gossip that caused the most uproar in Spielberg, it was the weather.
Every now and then, the phones in the media center started to vibrate and beep. A weather alert. And another one. And another one. “Danger to life,” the Austrian emergency system dryly reported in bright red. Severe weather was coming, and fast. The journalists in the media room looked at each other with a grin. Sure, that’s likely. Outside, there were some threatening clouds, but nothing we hadn’t seen before in the mountains surrounding the circuit.
Until it turned pitch black.
Within minutes, the weather changed dramatically. Out of nowhere, it started to hail heavily. Not soft, grainy snowballs, but real marbles of ice that fell onto the paddock roof and the hospitality units at an alarming speed.Apologies for the confusion. Please provide the text in the source language that needs to be translated and optimized for Dutch newspaper readers.
Freddy Mercury
Later that evening, things took a serious turn. We were driving back to our accommodation in Graz when the sky opened up again. Hailstones the size of ping pong balls pounded the roof and hood of our car. The windshield wipers struggled, lightning flashed so frequently it felt like we were driving through a strobe-lit tunnel, and visibility was virtually zero. As nonchalant as we had been during the day, the situation in the rental car was now ominous. The line from Bohemian Rhapsody kept playing in my head: “Thunderbolt and lightning, very, very frightening me.”
Mother Nature showed on Thursday who really rules in Austria. Fortunately, the weather forecast for the coming days is splendid, so the drivers can once again determine who rules the Red Bull Ring.
