The circuit opened with innovative facilities that made it one of the safest motor racing circuits in the world at the time. The original site featured three track layout permutations, a large industrial park, and an airstrip. Mild winter weather combined with the airstrip made the circuit popular among racing teams for winter off-season testing.
The track was inaugurated with a 2-litre sports car race. The first Formula One French Grand Prix at Paul Ricard was held in 1971. During the 1970s and 1980s, the circuit helped develop prominent French drivers, including four-time World Drivers' Champion Alain Prost, who won the French Grand Prix there in 1983, 1988, 1989, and 1990.
The original Long Circuit measured 5.809 km (3.610 mi) and was dominated by the 1.8 km (1.1 mi) Mistral Straight followed by the high-speed right-hand Signes corner. These fast sections were notoriously hard on engines and produced several major accidents. During the 1985 French Grand Prix, Ayrton Senna crashed heavily at Signes after the Renault engine in his Lotus failed; he went off backwards on his own oil. During the same weekend, Nigel Mansell suffered a concussion after a slow puncture at over 320 km/h (200 mph) caused his left rear tyre to explode and detached the rear wing of his Williams FW10. Despite those incidents, Mansell's teammate Keke Rosberg set the original circuit race lap record of 1:39.914 at the same event.
During qualifying for the 1985 race, Swiss driver Marc Surer clocked what was then the highest speed recorded by a Formula One car on the Mistral, pushing his turbocharged, 1,000 bhp Brabham-BMW to 335 km/h (208 mph). This compared sharply with the slowest qualifier, Stefan Bellof's naturally aspirated Tyrrell-Ford V8 at 277 km/h (172 mph); Bellof qualified 9 seconds slower than Surer and 12 seconds slower than pole-winner Rosberg.
In 1986, Brabham Formula One driver Elio de Angelis was killed in a testing accident at the fast Verrerie curves after the rear wing of his Brabham BT55 broke off. The circuit was subsequently modified: the Mistral Straight was reduced from 1.8 km (1.1 mi) to just over 1.0 km (0.62 mi), and the Verrerie sweepers were bypassed by a new short section that connected the pit straight directly to the middle of the Mistral. This shortened Club Circuit measured 3.812 km (2.369 mi) and was used for the French Grand Prix from 1986 to 1990. The effect on lap times was dramatic: Rosberg's 1985 pole time of 1:32.462 in his Williams-Honda turbo fell to Mansell's 1990 pole time of 1:04.402 in his V12 Ferrari.
From 1990 the French Grand Prix moved to Magny-Cours, where it ran until 2008. During the 1990s, Paul Ricard's use was limited largely to motorcycle racing and French national events, most notably the Bol d'Or 24-hour motorcycle endurance race, which ran there until 1999. The track was also the home of the Oreca F3000 team.
After Paul Ricard's death, the track was sold in 1999 to Excelis, a company owned by Formula One promoter Bernie Ecclestone. It was rebuilt into an advanced test facility known for a time as the Paul Ricard High Tech Test Track (HTTT). The modernised circuit offers 247 possible configurations ranging from 0.828 km (0.514 mi) to the full 5.858 km (3.640 mi). The track's signature runoff areas were introduced during this period: the Blue Zone, a mixture of asphalt and tungsten used in place of conventional gravel traps, and the Red Zone, a more abrasive surface designed to maximise tyre grip and hence minimise braking distances, at the cost of extreme tyre wear. Tecpro barriers form the final safeguard.
In 2006, the circuit hosted the Paul Ricard 500km, a round of the FIA GT Championship. On 5 December 2016, it was announced that the French Grand Prix would return to the Formula One calendar at Paul Ricard for the 2018 season — the first French Grand Prix since 2008 and the first at Paul Ricard since 1990.
The French Grand Prix returned to Paul Ricard on 24 June 2018. The circuit remained on the Formula One calendar through the 2022 season, after which it dropped off again. The current 1C-V2 layout race lap record is 1:32.740, set by Sebastian Vettel during the 2019 French Grand Prix. In 2019, the pitlane entry was moved from the main straight to a position between turns 14 and 15 following safety concerns.
The track is built on a flat plateau with 247 possible configuration layouts. On six of the 14 occasions (1971, 1975, 1976, 1978, 1980, and 1989) on which the French Grand Prix was held at Paul Ricard, the winner went on to win the World Championship that year. Ronnie Peterson (1973 and 1974) and René Arnoux (1982) are the only Paul Ricard French Grand Prix winners who never won the world championship.
The circuit holds the 3-star FIA Environmental Accreditation. In a 2021 report, it was ranked the second most sustainable racetrack in the world, together with Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya and behind Mugello Circuit.
Current events at Paul Ricard include the GT World Challenge Europe 3 Hours of Paul Ricard, the European Le Mans Series 4 Hours of Castellet, Ferrari Challenge Europe, Ferrari Challenge UK, the Lamborghini Super Trofeo Europe, the FIM Endurance World Championship, and junior single-seater categories including Formula Regional and the French F4 Championship. The circuit also has a Karting Test Track (KTT) featuring the same abrasive safety-zone surface as the car circuit.
This article is based solely on the supplied corpus. No external sources were consulted; claims that could not be substantiated against the corpus were omitted under the drop-the-claim rule.
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