ÖAMTC Saalfelden/Brandlhof: Night of Thunder and a settling-pond loop

In mid-October 2020 the rain falling over the new loop near Saalfelden was the kind that in Salzburg is called “Schnürlregen”. Even so, over two days, 16 and 17 October, 70 participants drove it in single-seat racing cars, touring cars, prototypes, rally cars, historic racing cars and a few drift cars; athletes came from Germany, and motorsport clubs from Vorarlberg, Tyrol and Salzburg. These were the first track days at the Experience Center, built as an addition to the driving technique centre of the Austrian automobile club ÖAMTC by the Gut Brandlhof hotel; on 19 October the club announced that the loop was open and could be booked. In the 1960s the ground under the asphalt served the neighbouring gravel pit as a sludge settling pond, and afterwards it was an intensively farmed meadow for decades.

Location	Hohlwegen 4, Saalfelden am Steinernen Meer, state of Salzburg; 5 km north of Saalfelden and 20 km south of Lofer, at the foot of the Steinernes Meer massif, at an altitude of 695 m
Type	driving technique centre (Fahrtechnik Zentrum) with the Experience Center handling loop, an off-road park and two ice arenas
Opened	centre in 1989, Experience Center in October 2020
Experience Center loop	1,230 m with kerbs, gradients up to 11 percent, driven in both directions; shorter variants of 640 and 580 m
Loop design	Franz Wurz and Alexander Wurz
Area	centre: 70,000 m² of asphalt and 40,000 m² of off-road terrain; Experience Center: 50,000 m²; in winter ice arenas covering 170,000 m²
Cost of the Experience Center	5.5 million euros
Operator	ÖAMTC Fahrtechnik GmbH; centre manager Manfred Pfeiffenberger
Events	Gruppe B Rallyelegenden (2014–2016), in 2015 and 2016 with a night show at the centre; a round of the Austrian drift championship (2011); track days since 2020
For amateurs	Racing Experience PKW in your own car on the loop, 369 euros (as of 4 October 2026); Personal Coaching on the loop from three units of 50 minutes
Status	active; since 9 September 2026 the whole site also operates under the Experience World Saalfelden brand

The Haflinger stud and the plot next door

Gut Brandlhof was a stud farm for Haflinger horses when, at the end of the 1970s, it was bought together with more than 400 ha of land by Anton Maier, a merchant from Wels. A sports hotel opened here in 1982. In 1989 ÖAMTC opened a driver training centre on the neighbouring plot. According to texts published in 2022 for the hotel's fortieth anniversary, the new centre was then taken over by former racing driver Alexander Strobl. At Brandlhof he met the owner's daughter, Birgit Maier, now his wife, and over the following decades the two tied the hotel ever more closely to motoring.

As a hotelier, Strobl kept racing. In September 2011 the hotel announced that its head had won the touring car class of the St. Urban/Simonhöhe hill climb in Carinthia for the third year in a row, by 0.43 s, driving a four-wheel-drive Ford Escort Cosworth with an engine of about 700 hp. The same press release presented the ÖAMTC centre as the place where the hotelier trains. The centre's address is Hohlwegen 4, the site of its later expansion lies right by the B311 road, and the German border is not far from here.

Skid pad, circle and ice

The original centre covers 70,000 m² of asphalt. It has a skid pad, a drift track and an aquaplaning pool, and drivers of cars, lorries, buses and motorcycles train here. For 10 May 2008 ÖAMTC sent out invitations to the opening of a new circular track, the Kreisbahn, together with a drift track, a handling track and a helipad; the invitation spoke of more than two years of planning and six months of construction. The hotel describes the centre's handling track as a 7 ha site with a closed 1.8 km loop, grippy asphalt and demanding combinations of corners; ÖAMTC gives the same length.

In winter the centre moves onto ice: two arenas operate from January to early March. For 17 February 2007 ÖAMTC announced there the third edition of the evening show BP Ultimate Ice Night Drift Challenge, in which those due to slide across the ice included extreme athlete Felix Baumgartner, television presenter Christian Clerici and drivers Kris Rosenberger and Heinz Kinigadner, while former Formula 1 driver Karl Wendlinger was to sit on the jury. Centre manager Manfred Pfeiffenberger described it briefly: “It's like figure skating with a car”. Pfeiffenberger, born in 1981 in Schwarzach, competed in rallies himself; according to ÖAMTC he took his first international-level win in 2005 at the Int. Mühlviertel Rallye, and in March 2008 the club announced his return to rallying at the wheel of a Mitsubishi Evo IX.

On the centre's karting track, in 9 hp karts, skiers of the Austrian national team raced each other in 2011, during a training camp in nearby Leogang. Marcel Hirscher won qualifying with a lap time of 29.2 s, but head coach Matthias Berthold took the race by a whisker, ahead of Michael Pircher from the coaching staff and Hirscher. The same spring, for 15 and 16 April 2011, ÖAMTC scheduled the first round of the Austrian drift championship, the Drift Challenge Austria, in Saalfelden and announced nearly 50 drivers.

Night of thunder

In July 2015 and 2016 the grounds below the Steinernes Meer turned into the arena of the Gruppe B Rallyelegenden, a show of old rally cars, especially from Group B, which the FIA withdrew from the world championship after the 1986 season. The Austrian premiere of the event took place in Saalfelden on 11 and 12 July 2014. According to a review published in December by the magazine “Motor Freizeit Trends”, 85 participants from eight countries came and about 25,000 spectators watched; the organiser was the association Interessensgemeinschaft Gr. B Rallyelegenden Österreich, and the whole event was run as a demonstration without a licence and without timing. The routes ran through Saalfelden and the neighbouring municipalities of Weißbach bei Lofer and Maishofen, and the finale of the second day was the “Hexenkessel”, the “witches' cauldron”, a stage in the town centre.

The ÖAMTC centre got the evening of the first day. In 2015, after the ceremonial start on the Rathausplatz in Saalfelden, the “Nacht des Donners”, the Night of Thunder, opened the shows there. A year later, at the third edition, the organiser announced for Friday 8 July a demonstration programme from 19:00 and the actual stage from 20:30, and ORF Sport + broadcast the Night of Thunder live from 20:15. Alongside a drift show and a supermoto race, cars ranging from the Lancia Stratos of the 1970s to Audis drove around the grounds, and several thousand people watched them. The hotel's “Autohaus” then displayed Group S prototypes, the class that under FIA plans was to follow Group B into the World Rally Championship in 1988; the plans were abandoned when Group B was withdrawn. Audi Quattro driver Johann Holzmüller explained to an ORF reporter what such events are for:

“You can't officially race this car in competition, after all. That's why all we have left are such ‘fun events’.”

Sepp Haider from Saalbach, who according to ORF won a world championship round in New Zealand in 1988, squeezed what he could out of an old Opel Kadett that evening and admitted that he probably had too little power for the local hill. A month later the organiser announced the end of the event after three editions: “An old proverb says that you should stop when it is at its most beautiful”. Peter Freisinger, who was behind it, did not rule out a return, however. In 2018 the Gruppe B Rallyelegenden came back with Freisinger at another venue: in Melk and at the ÖAMTC Wachauring centre.

Settling pond, frogs and 5.5 million euros

Pfeiffenberger had the idea for the loop, as ÖAMTC's club magazine wrote, “in the drawer for a long time”; a feasibility study settled the decision to build. In summer 2019 the Saalfelden municipal council rezoned an area of about 4.4 ha, lying between the SSK quarry and the Dießbach power station, from green land to transport land. Councillors of the SPÖ, ÖVP and FPÖ voted in favour, the Greens against. At the beginning of December 2019 the “Salzburger Nachrichten” described the first earthworks and ÖAMTC's plan to join, together with Brandlhof, the premier league of venues for international car presentations. In May 2020 the club announced the start of construction of the loop and said it would also give the motorsport community additional space for events.

The Experience Center opened in October 2020, after about eight months of construction, at a cost of 5.5 million euros; the work was mostly contracted to local firms. “After two years of planning, a rezoning procedure and an intensive construction phase, we can finally open the barriers”, Pfeiffenberger summed up. The club bought the 50,000 m² Experience Center site, and the investment came with nature conservation requirements. On 22,800 m² of leased compensation land, wet tall-herb meadows, flower meadows, chains of small pools and five ponds were created under the supervision of the Institute of Ecology in Salzburg; 700 m of amphibian guidance system was built around them, a wildlife migration corridor was preserved, and the boundary of the site is marked by 320 shrubs and trees of wild species. Under photos of the low walls around the loop, which keep small animals from getting stuck on the track, the club magazine wrote: “No frogs get run over here”.

1,230 metres in both directions

The ÖAMTC magazine described the loop as a small race track: flowing combinations of corners, a smoothly laid-out slalom with several sharp bends, a chicane and one hairpin each at the north-western and south-eastern ends. According to the same text it was designed by Franz Wurz, European rallycross champion of 1974, and his son Alexander, Formula 1 expert and commentator at ORF; their company Test & Training lists the ÖAMTC centre in Saalfelden among its projects. Today the operator gives a length of 1,230 m. The shorter variants are 640 and 580 m long, gradients reach 11 percent, and the loop can be driven in both directions. Next to it lie a 160 by 22 m dynamic pad with a sprinkler system, two lanes with a low-grip surface and a 2,500 m² presentation area.

The centre's main customers are companies. The operator lists tyre tests on a wet surface with a repeatable degree of wetness, trials of driver assistance and autonomous driving systems, range tests of electric cars and presentations of new models. In September 2022 a MeinBezirk reporter tested here, with an ÖAMTC instructor, the driver assistance systems that newly type-approved cars had to have from 6 July that year. In a 2026 press release the centre lists BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Audi among its past customers.

Experience World

On 9 September 2026 the centre, the Experience Center, the off-road park and the ice arenas began to appear under a common brand, Experience World Saalfelden, aimed at companies, with a particular focus on the German market. According to the operator the whole site covers 330,000 m². The off-road park has 40,000 m² on the grounds of a gravel pit, with a river crossing and a forest route. Pfeiffenberger, presented in the press release as a former professional rally driver and long-time manager of the centre, runs Experience World with a team of 20 people; about 70 percent of the business comes from corporate clients. Karl Hartner of automagazin.at commented on the change with the remark that Saalfelden has to offer more than a race track with mountains in the background.

In your own car on the loop

For a private driver the loop is open mainly through training courses. ÖAMTC runs Racing Experience PKW on it: a day of driving on the loop and the dynamic pad with an instructor who stays in constant radio contact with the participant, learning how to behave on a track, how to choose a line and how to brake in a sporty way. The club recommends completing another of its courses first and writes that it is best to come in your own car, with any car being suitable; a car can also be rented for the course. Own cars on the Racing Experience are not covered by the group comprehensive insurance (autocasco) that ÖAMTC takes out for some other courses, and then only for cars registered in Austria. Individual Personal Coaching on the Experience Center loop can be booked from three units of 50 minutes, with the price set directly at the centre.

The hotel says the loop can also be hired exclusively by motorsport enthusiasts, for example for club outings. The company Pfister Racing had a Sportfahrertraining at the Experience Center Saalfelden in its calendar for 21 June 2026; according to its general description this is training in your own car, with an instructor in the passenger seat on request and with two groups taking turns on the track every 45 minutes. The calendar of Racing Rookie, a talent contest for drivers aged 16 to 21, scheduled a qualifying round at the Saalfelden centre for 30 July 2022. In the ÖAMTC booking system at the beginning of October 2026 the only Racing Experience date in Saalfelden was Sunday 11 October, from 9:20 to 16:30, for at most eight drivers, at 369 euros.

Timeline

• late 1970s: Anton Maier buys the Gut Brandlhof Haflinger stud.
• 1982: the Gut Brandlhof sports hotel opens.
• 1989: ÖAMTC opens a driver training centre on the neighbouring plot; it is run by Alexander Strobl.
• 10 May 2008: scheduled opening of the circular track with a drift track, a handling track and a helipad.
• 15–16 April 2011: scheduled first round of the Austrian drift championship.
• 2014–2016: three editions of the Gruppe B Rallyelegenden; in 2015 and 2016 their Night of Thunder takes place at the centre.
• 2019: rezoning of the land for the Experience Center, first earthworks.
• 16–17 October 2020: first track days on the new loop; on 19 October ÖAMTC announces its opening.
• 9 September 2026: launch of the Experience World Saalfelden brand.