Autodrom Most: a circuit on a spoil heap in a town given to coal

On Sunday 14 August 1983 about a hundred thousand people came to the spoil heap of the former Vrbenský brown coal opencast mine near Most. The Interserie prototype race was only a pretext: they came to see the first permanent racing circuit in Czechoslovakia, built on a spoil heap in a town that the authorities were demolishing at the very same time in order to reach the coal lying beneath it. More than forty years later, the superbike world championship and European trucks race on that same asphalt, and the decibels coming from the circuit were ruled on by the Czech Constitutional Court.

Location	Most (Souš district), Ústí nad Labem Region, Czech Republic; about 3 km west of the centre, below Hněvín castle
Type	permanent racing circuit, for cars and motorcycles
Length and configuration	4212 m, 21 corners (9 left, 12 right), width 12–14 m, longest straight 792 m
Direction of travel	clockwise
Elevation difference	12.04 m; maximum climb +2.8 percent, descent −3.2 percent
Opening	14 August 1983 (built 1978–1983)
Lap record, cars (since 2005)	1:22.981, Bernd Herndlhofer, Arrows A22 (F1), 29 August 2020
Lap record, motorcycles (since 2005)	1:29.920, Nicolò Bulega, Ducati Panigale V4 R, 17 May 2026
Lap record, trucks	2:01.340, David Vršecký, Freightliner, 31 August 2009
Owner and operator	AUTODROM MOST a.s.; since May 2026 in the hands of Roman Staněk's RIQ Investments group
Most important events	WorldSBK (since 2021), FIA ETRC Czech Truck Prix (since 1993), NASCAR Euro Series, formerly Interserie
Status	active; FIA grade 2 licence

The town that gave way to coal

To understand why the circuit at Most lies on a spoil heap, you have to start with the decision of the Czechoslovak government of 26 March 1964. By resolution no. 180 the authorities decided to liquidate the historic town of Most, because about a hundred million tonnes of brown coal lay beneath it. Thirty thousand inhabitants were resettled into new housing estates, and the demolition went on until 1 April 1987. Of the old Most essentially only the Gothic church of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary survived; in the autumn of 1975 it was moved 841 metres along rails.

Racing in this town was older than that decision. The first motorcycle race took place on 25 May 1947 on the streets around the brewery in the Zahražany district, and five years later cars raced there for the first time. Over the next three decades the organisers moved the courses from place to place, and the reasons were very much of Most: the poor state of the cobbles, the hospital moving into a building by the start, noise, and later the planned expansion of the opencast mines. The five kilometre loop through Kopisty ceased to exist when, in the 1970s, the village of Kopisty was demolished to make way for the mine. The course at Rudolice is remembered mainly for a tragedy: on 30 April 1962 the motorcyclist Jiří Kořínek was killed there in practice, and in 1976 a small memorial to him was put up in the corner by the sewage treatment plant.

In 1965 the first national championship points were awarded on the loop in the Stalingrad district, and at the start of the 1970s car racing moved to an expressway under construction next to the new railway station. That circuit „u nádraží” measured 3450 metres in its final version, had the shape of a figure of eight and double barriers along almost its entire length. In 1979 the Interserie came here, the series of the fastest prototypes of the day, and according to the circuit's anniversary book spectators from neighbouring East Germany „poured in like an avalanche”. The end of the loop in its full, housing estate version was however hastened not by speed but by everyday life: during one of the races an ambulance could not reach a woman giving birth on the estate. Complaints from residents about noise and closed streets were added to that, so the course was shortened, and since it was still considered dangerous, it was decided that a dedicated circuit would be built on the spoil heap outside the town.

A design out of FIA rules and television

The study for the circuit was prepared in 1976 by a group led by Václav Paur. The authors visited Hockenheim and the Nürburgring but, as the operator itself admits today, they were designing essentially on the basis of FIA and FIM regulations, the specialist press and television broadcasts. In the study they compared the speeds of various vehicles in individual corners, except that the final shape was imposed by the terrain: the filled in basin left by the mine. Construction on 140 hectares started in 1978, and the circuit was meant to be part of a larger sports and defence centre. According to moto.cz the surface was accepted in the autumn of 1982 and a trial car race was held, while the old starting tower from the loop by the station was dismantled and moved to the autodrom, where it served for the first few years. The operator gives 26 June 1983 as the date of the trial races; the official opening followed on 14 August 1983 with an Interserie race for the Cup of the Town of Most, whose director was František Pátek.

The circuit measured a little over four kilometres at the time and had twenty corners. The FIA technical steward is said to have stated at the opening that in terms of driving he ranked Most among the safest circuits in Europe. The Interserie came back every year; in 2003 the circuit's director Gerhard Ittner said it was being held at Most for about the twentieth time. In 1993 Giovanni Lavaggi pushed the average speed record up to 197.297 km/h in a Kremer-Porsche CK7, and nobody exceeded the 200 km/h mark on the old layout: the last record, 198.932 km/h by Earl Goddard in 2002, stood unbeaten until the first corner was rebuilt. Motorcycles returned to Most on 10 June 1984 with a race of the Czechoslovak championship, 48 days later the circuit was used for the first time by the Swiss, who cannot organise circuit races in their own country, and on 14 June 1987 the first round of the European motorcycle championship was held here. The circuit worked almost without a break: in 1988 it was in use 302 days a year, and in the years 1993–2003 an average of 277 days.

Trucks on the spoil heap

In September 1992 the organisers risked something that, as the anniversary book recalls, most of the officials warned against: a truck race on a circuit built on a spoil heap. The fear was that the mass of the five tonne machines would damage the ground. The opening weekend, 4–6 September 1992, was hosted by the comedian Petr Novotný, the country band Fešáci played live on a truck, and Stig Blomqvist, Slim Borgudd and Steve Parrish were on the grid. The colours of Czechoslovakia were defended by LIAZ trucks with František Vojtíšek and Karel Patočka, who won one of the heats. A year later Most entered the FIA European championship calendar; in 1993 Gérard Cyunet, Gerd Körber and Steve Parrish won in classes A, B and C. Since then the Czech Truck Prix has been a fixed point of the European truck championship calendar.

Truck racing became for Most what the motorcycle Grand Prix was for Brno: the event by which the circuit is known. In 1997 a Praga TN 24.420 with a body designed by Václav Král appeared on the grid, and Martin Koloc took four victories with it at Most in a single weekend. The truck lap record, 2:01.340 by David Vršecký in a Freightliner on 31 August 2009, still stands today.

Five months to save the licence

The 1990s began at Most with the threat of losing everything. After Svazarm was dissolved in the summer of 1990 the circuit was managed by the AMK BSM Most auto and motorcycle club; in 1993 Jiří Kroužek became its chairman, and the autodrom faced having its homologation withdrawn as of 31 December 1993. The operator itself describes that period bluntly: the circuit was falling apart and lost its licence certificates for championship car and motorcycle races. The company Autodrom Most s.r.o., founded with the participation of the town of Most, the club and Kroužek, began the refurbishment in December and finished it in five months. RacingCircuits.info adds the details: new barriers, 20,000 tonnes of gravel in the safety zones and the recovery of the FIA and FIM licences as early as May 1995; a year later a medical centre and two grandstands along the start straight were added.

Claude Denis, president of the FIM road racing commission, is said to have stated after the inspection:

„The circuit at Most has world class parameters and today the only thing it lacks is world class races. I am very pleasantly surprised that in Most a reconstruction on such a scale was successfully carried out in such a short time.”

In 2000 the company was converted into a joint stock company, and in 2003 the shareholders decided on a general reconstruction. Homologation for the 2003 season required a long list of works after the visit of the FIA inspectors: tightening bolts in the barriers, topping up gravel, extending barriers and FIA fencing, replacing kerbs. „It is a whole set of works that arose from the November visit of the FIA safety inspectors and from the December meeting of the FIA safety commission in Hockenheim”, explained the sporting director Gerhard Ittner. The most important decision, however, concerned the first corner.

Retardér

The first corner after the start was called the retardér at Most: a gentle arc at the end of the straight, of which the anniversary book says that drivers called it „the one for the heart”, because flat out it could only be taken on a single line. It was there, on 14 July 2002, that Fritz Glatz was killed, a Viennese businessman and driver racing under the pseudonym „Frederico Careca”, who had won at Most in the Interserie in the 1990s and knew the circuit perfectly. In a race of the EuroBOSS series, the European championship for historic Formula 1 cars, he was leading in a Ford powered Arrows Footwork FA17; while lapping a slower competitor he rode over a kerb, the car took off and after a series of rolls hit a barrier. Glatz died the same day in the hospital at Most, aged 58. The sporting commission judged the event to be an accident caused by driver error.

A year earlier the circuit unexpectedly hosted a round of the European Le Mans Series. On 5 August 2001 Patrick Lemarié and Stefan Johansson won in an Audi R8 on the 4148 metre loop, and the field was so thin that nine cars were classified.

In February 2003 the inspectors Klaus Steinmetz and Uwe Frumolt looked with the circuit's management for a new solution for the retardér. Ittner announced that after the season the gentle arc would go, and in its place a classic chicane would be built with a sharp right and left corner, wide safety zones and new kerbs. The operator states that traffic on the circuit with the new layout started on 27 April 2005, and that on 6 November 2005 the polygon was opened alongside it, a 13 hectare driver training centre with skid pads, which took over the training of emergency service drivers that had been run at the circuit since it opened. RacingCircuits.info compares the new chicane to the first chicane at Monza: much slower, but offering room to overtake; its construction also meant the removal of the rarely used short loop. From that moment the records are counted anew: the old ones, with the retardér layout, are 1:15.065 by Earl Goddard in a Benetton with a Ford HB engine (2002) and 1:29.851 by Christer Lindholm on a Yamaha (1999).

Superbikes and neighbours

In May 2014 the circuit changed hands: it was bought by the Swiss company BA Group AG, and its spokesman announced in Mostecký deník that the number of big race weekends, which had fallen to three that season, would grow to at least five. In the following years Josef Zajíček appeared as the owner and chairman of the board, according to ČTK the owner of the autodrom since 2014. In his time ADAC GT Masters came to Most (2018), and on 29 April 2021 a five year agreement with Dorna was announced in Prague: the circuit entered the WorldSBK calendar as a replacement for the Phillip Island round cancelled because of the pandemic. „This is a milestone and a unique event in the almost forty year history of the autodrom. For the first time we are becoming organisers of world championship races”, said Zajíček.

The year 2021 was a season of debuts for Most. In August the first WorldSBK round was held, in the same month the WTCR promoter added the circuit to the calendar in place of the cancelled Asian rounds, and on 9 October the finale of the motorcycle endurance world championship, the 6 Hours of Most, was decided by a margin of 0.070 s between BMW and Yamaha, which Cycle News described as the closest finish in the history of the series. The WTCR was to return in 2022 as the season opener, but the round was cancelled after a state of emergency was declared in the Czech Republic in connection with the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The WorldSBK riders were not delighted at first. Álvaro Bautista recalled in Speedweek in 2025: „On our first visit to Most the circuit was still completely different. Fortunately they worked very hard. Some run off areas were enlarged”, and about the surface: „In the first two years it was crazy. The surface in the first corner was really badly damaged”. The operator did indeed invest: in the autumn of 2021 the surface was replaced, in the winter of 2022 4.5 km of drainage was laid, the safety zones in several corners were widened by 4–6 m and 5500 tonnes of gravel were brought in. Attendance grew from 54,000 spectators in 2023 to almost 60,000 in 2024, which according to the promoter gave Most second place in the season, and in May 2025 the agreement was extended to the end of 2030. Bautista summed the thing up in his own way: „Most and Brno are two completely different circuits. Most is much tighter and has more of a stop and go layout. I like Brno more, but Most is not bad either. There are worse circuits on the calendar”.

The very traffic that pleased the promoter bothered the neighbours. The circuit has the Souš district beyond its fence, and since 2017 a municipal ordinance has banned the use of loud machinery on public holidays; measurements by the town hall showed the limits being exceeded many times over. In 2018 the Hulička couple, who live next door, sued the autodrom. The district court in Most dismissed the suit twice, but on 20 March 2025 the regional court in Ústí nad Labem ruled that the circuit may not disturb its surroundings with noise beyond the measure appropriate to the circumstances, and set thresholds of 55 dB on weekdays and 50 dB on Sundays and public holidays; in doing so it compared Most with the Sachsenring, where the limits may be exceeded on ten days a year. The claimants' lawyer Václav Láska argued that the problem is not the races but the commercial driving from eight to eight, weekends included, whose customers are mainly drivers from Germany and Austria who cannot drive that loudly at home. The operator replied that it acts in accordance with its permit for use and that renting out the circuit is its main source of income; Zajíček told Aktuálně.cz about the search for an investor. The Supreme Court rejected the appeal on points of law in November 2025, and on 7 July 2026 the Constitutional Court dismissed the autodrom's complaint. The judge rapporteur Tomáš Langášek gave as his reasoning that the courts had not banned the company from doing business, only limited it, and that the comparison with the Sachsenring shows that such measures are feasible.

The circuit also has its own list of victims from outside racing. In September 2008, during private test driving rented by customers from Germany, a motorcyclist hit a man walking along the track; both died. In April 2010, after two motorcycles collided, one of the riders died in hospital. On 6 July 2021, on a public holiday, two motorcycles of German participants collided at a closed event: one of them had failed to move off from the grid and was returning to the track as the first competitor lapping him was approaching. Both died on the spot.

A new owner and track days

At the end of 2024 Hospodářské noviny revealed that the autodrom was up for sale after ten years, and Zajíček spoke of four interested parties, including one from abroad. In the spring of 2026 it came to light what the transaction was to look like: on 17 April the general assembly of the Autoclub of the Czech Republic approved the intention to create a joint venture with the RIQ Investments group of the billionaire Roman Staněk, father of the formula driver, in which the Autoclub will take 35 percent in exchange for contributing its Prague building on Opletalova street, and Staněk will contribute the autodrom bought from Zajíček. Staněk valued the circuit at as much as a billion crowns; the Autoclub's president Jan Šťovíček spoke of a talent academy, and also of a possible rallycross and karting track on the site. At the beginning of May 2026 RIQ Investments took over one hundred percent of the shares of AUTODROM MOST a.s.; the municipal service Mostecké listy noted a meeting of the town's mayor Marek Hrvol with the new owner. Mostecký deník observed that there is not a word in the new owner's statement about the noise dispute.

For an amateur driver Most is a circuit where entry is bought like a ticket. In its online shop the operator sells 25 minute „test drives” in your own car (1500 CZK) or on your own motorcycle (1000 CZK), for adults only; a helmet is compulsory in the car, the motorcycle must have a standard silencer or an effective exhaust insert, and every participant signs a declaration at the starting tower and collects a voucher. For the 2026 season the list of customer driving days published by the operator, from June to November, covers 128 days, of which 99 are for motorcycles and 29 for cars; most of the organisers are motorcycle schools from Germany and Switzerland, alongside Czech ones and six days of the Polish organiser CR Moto. The latter warns participants that strict noise control applies at the circuit: only standard exhausts or exhausts with db-killer silencers are allowed, and a measurement at half of maximum revs may not exceed 101 dB. The Šenkýř Motorsport team runs car track days here in an open pit lane format, with a Porsche 992 GT3 Cup and a BMW M2 available for hire with an instructor.

This whole construction, world championship weekends and dozens of days of commercial hire, stands today on the same spoil heap onto which, in 1992, the officials were afraid to let trucks. For 16 September 2026 the operator has put seven car sessions and seven motorcycle sessions of 25 minutes each into the shop. A few hundred metres away, in Souš, the judgments with thresholds of 55 and 50 decibels apply.

Timeline

• 1947: 25 May, the first motorcycle race in Most, on the streets around the brewery.
• 1964: the Czechoslovak government decides to liquidate old Most for the coal opencast mine.
• 1965: the first national championship points on the loop in the Stalingrad district.
• 1975: the Gothic church is moved 841 metres.
• 1976: the study for the circuit under the direction of Václav Paur.
• 1978: the start of construction on the spoil heap of the Vrbenský mine.
• 1979: the first Interserie race on the street circuit by the station.
• 1983: 14 August, the opening of the autodrom with an Interserie race for the Cup of the Town of Most.
• 1984: the first round of the Czechoslovak motorcycle championship at the circuit (10 June).
• 1987: the first round of the European motorcycle championship (14 June).
• 1992: the first truck race (4–6 September).
• 1993: Most in the European truck championship calendar; the threat of losing homologation.
• 1995: the company Autodrom Most s.r.o. takes over the circuit, the FIA and FIM licences are recovered after a five month refurbishment.
• 2001: a round of the European Le Mans Series.
• 2002: 14 July, the death of Fritz Glatz in a EuroBOSS race.
• 2005: 27 April, the opening of the circuit with the new chicane in place of the retardér; 6 November, the opening of the polygon.
• 2014: the sale of the circuit to the Swiss BA Group AG; Josef Zajíček becomes the owner.
• 2021: the WorldSBK debut (August), the WTCR and the FIM EWC finale (9 October).
• 2025: 20 March, the final judgment in the noise case; May, the extension of WorldSBK to 2030.
• 2026: May, RIQ Investments takes over the autodrom; 7 July, the Constitutional Court dismisses the circuit's complaint.