Big Red, Turn One, and the Circuit That Brought F1 Back to America: Circuit of the Americas

Built in under two years on a former cattle ranch outside Austin, COTA is the most important race track America has produced in a generation.

Formula 1 had a complicated relationship with the United States for a long time.

The sport visited and left. It tried Indianapolis and Watkins Glen and Dallas and Phoenix and Las Vegas. Some of those experiments worked for a while. Most of them didn't. By 2008, the United States Grand Prix was gone, killed by a tyre fiasco and a circuit dispute, and there was genuine uncertainty about whether F1 would ever find a permanent home in North America.

Then a promoter named Tavo Hellmund sat down with Bernie Ecclestone, signed a deal, and started building a race track on 890 acres of undeveloped land outside Austin, Texas.

Circuit of the Americas opened in 2012. It was the first purpose-built Formula 1 circuit in United States history. Fourteen years later, it is the anchor of F1's American expansion and one of the most visited racing facilities in the world. What happened in between is a story worth telling.

Born Out of a Handshake and a Lot of Problems

The idea for Circuit of the Americas (COTA) came together quickly. In July 2010, Hellmund announced plans to build the circuit on land in Travis County, southeast of Austin. Texas billionaire Red McCombs was the largest investor. He wanted to call it Speed City. The name Circuit of the Americas was announced in April 2011.

What followed was not smooth. High-pressure gas lines were discovered on the site. The clay soil proved unstable, requiring expensive additional engineering. Hellmund's company was eventually cut out of the promotion deal by McCombs and co-investor Bobby Epstein, who struck a new arrangement directly with Ecclestone. Hellmund sued. They settled. Construction continued.

The total cost came in at around 300 million dollars. GPS-based 3D paving equipment was used to meet the FIA's exacting grade requirements. The first layer of asphalt was finished on August 3, 2012. The final layer was complete by September 21. The track opened officially on October 21, 2012, when Mario Andretti ran the ceremonial first laps in the Lotus 79 he drove when he became the last American to win the Formula 1 World Championship back in 1978. It was a detail that landed exactly right.

The Layout: Borrowed from the Best

Hermann Tilke designed COTA with a specific philosophy: take what works from the greatest circuits in the world and build something that synthesises them into a coherent track. The result is a circuit that feels familiar in places and genuinely original in others.

Turn 1 is the defining feature. From the start line, the cars climb a gradient of over 11 percent to a blind hairpin at the top of the hill, known officially as Big Red, named after Red McCombs. You cannot see the apex from the braking zone. You are committing to a corner you cannot fully see while still accelerating uphill. It is one of the most dramatic first corners in the sport.

From there the track drops into a sequence of fast sweepers modelled closely on Silverstone's Maggots-Becketts-Chapel complex. Turn 12 through to 15 replicates Istanbul's legendary Turn 8. There are elements drawn from Hockenheim, Interlagos, and the old Osterreichring. The circuit runs counter-clockwise, which puts unusual lateral demands on drivers' necks, and the elevation change across the lap is 41 metres.

Drivers praised it from the first lap. That is not always guaranteed with a new circuit. Here it was unanimous.

The First Race and the Man Who Won It

117,429 people attended the 2012 United States Grand Prix. For a sport that had been absent from American soil for five years, that number said everything about the pent-up demand.

The race itself delivered. Lewis Hamilton, in what would be his last race victory with McLaren before moving to Mercedes, hunted down Sebastian Vettel through lapped traffic and forced the Red Bull driver into a mistake to take the win by 0.675 seconds. It was the kind of race a new circuit could not have scripted better if it had tried.

Hamilton went on to win at COTA four more times, giving him five victories at the circuit. He dominated the track in the Mercedes years in a way that established COTA as his territory in the same way that Spa belonged to Senna. Charles Leclerc won in 2024 leading a Ferrari one-two, the team's first such result in the United States since 2006.

The Attendance Numbers Are Almost Unbelievable

When Drive to Survive arrived on Netflix and Formula 1's American fanbase started growing faster than any other market in the world, COTA was where that growth showed up most visibly.

440,000 people attended the 2022 United States Grand Prix across the three-day weekend. The Monday after the race became the busiest single day in the history of Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, with over 43,000 passengers processed. These are not racing numbers. These are major festival numbers. Taylor Swift-level event infrastructure numbers.

COTA handled it. The facility was built with scale in mind from the beginning. The main grandstand at Turn 1 holds enormous crowds. The open-air amphitheater at the base of the observation tower has hosted concerts from artists across every genre. The 25-storey observation tower itself has become one of the most photographed structures in Texas.

Not Just F1: MotoGP, NASCAR, WEC and More

One of the smartest decisions COTA made early was not building an F1-only facility. The circuit hosts the MotoGP Grand Prix of the Americas, which has its own chapter of history written almost entirely by one rider.

Marc Marquez arrived at COTA in 2013 as a rookie and won. He won again in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2021. Seven wins at the same circuit for one rider in MotoGP is a number that borders on absurd. He was so dominant at COTA that he earned the nickname King of COTA. The circuit's long, flowing first sector suited his aggressive, front-tyre-loading style better than almost anywhere on the calendar. Maverick Vinales hit a top speed of 355 km/h on an Aprilia MotoGP bike at the circuit in 2023.

NASCAR runs the EchoPark Automotive Grand Prix at COTA each spring. The World Endurance Championship brings the Lone Star Le Mans. IMSA, MotoAmerica, Porsche Challenge, Ferrari Challenge, the GT World Challenge America. The circuit runs events year-round across almost every major category in the sport.

Super Lap Battle: Where the Enthusiasts Take Over

Every year, before the Grand Prix crowds arrive, COTA hosts one of the most unique events on the American motorsport calendar: Super Lap Battle, the country's premier time attack competition.

Super Lap Battle is not wheel-to-wheel racing. It is a pure pursuit of the fastest possible lap time, run in individual sessions where every fraction of a second is the entire point. Competitors range from finely-tuned street cars to purpose-built track machines, organized into classes that span Street, Limited, Unlimited, and Pro/Comp. The fastest overall lap time in each class wins. That is the whole contest.

If you've been around Standing Start Co. for a minute, then you know how we are involved with various race series and help with designing art work for them.  One such race is the SLB where we supply artwork for their trophies.  We've loved working with SLB for many years of their annual race!

What makes Super Lap Battle at COTA special is the venue itself. Running time attack on a 3.4-mile Formula 1 circuit with 41 metres of elevation change and 20 corners demands a completely different approach than any typical track day. The blind crests, the commitment required through the Esses, the long back straight where the cars are wound out completely: every section of COTA tests something different, and the fastest drivers at Super Lap Battle find the limits of each one.

The event runs over a weekend and includes the Petrol Lounge Invitational, which brings out supercars and hypercars in between time attack sessions, a car show, and the kind of paddock energy that comes from a community of drivers who are genuinely obsessed with going fast. It is grassroots motorsport at the highest possible level, held on a track that also hosts the United States Grand Prix. That combination exists nowhere else in the country.

The Bumps: An Honest Assessment

COTA has one running problem that no amount of investment has fully solved: the track surface.

The clay soil on which the circuit was built has shifted and settled over the years, creating bumps that became genuinely controversial in the F1 paddock. Drivers complained loudly. Teams brought it up in technical meetings. The bumps at Turn 6 and through the Esses were severe enough that certain cars found sections of the track almost undriveable over race distance.

The circuit has resurfaced and ground down problem areas multiple times. Some have been resolved. Others have returned. It is the one persistent criticism of an otherwise well-regarded facility, and COTA continues to work through it. A track built on that soil, in a climate with the temperature swings of central Texas, is always going to require more maintenance than a circuit sitting on stable European bedrock.

What COTA Means

Circuit of the Americas exists because a group of people decided to bet 300 million dollars that American motorsport fans deserved a proper, purpose-built facility and would show up to use it.

They were right. The attendance records proved it. The concert crowds proved it. The Super Lap Battle community that returns every year proved it. The fact that F1 now runs three American races on a calendar that once had none proved it.

COTA is not the oldest circuit in the world. It does not have a century of history. It has not yet produced the kind of mythologised moments that Spa or Suzuka carry. But it is only thirteen years old, and it is already the most important race track that America has produced in fifty years. The next fifty should be interesting.

Turn 1 is waiting.

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