“I used to work at the Red Bull Ring. It has always felt a bit like a second home,” he says.
“Back then it was known as the Österreichring. I was 18 years old, and a driving instructor.”.
A teacher he may have been, but back then Toto himself was a pupil of motorsport, with dreams of graduating to the top of the class.
“I was trying to make a living and finance my own driving career,” he adds. The best part was always getting to shake down the cars at the end of the day when everyone else had gone home.”
This was 1991. The circuit had not hosted a race for four years because of safety concerns, with the infrastructure that surrounds the circuit today still some years from being put in place.
Things were very different for Toto, too.
“I would sleep in a farmhouse near to the track while I was doing the instructing, the people were super lovely and friendly,” he says.
“I would drive back and forth between Vienna in those days, in my Seat Ibiza. I could barely afford the fuel!”
The race returned to the F1 calendar in 1997, rebranded as the A1-Ring and bearing a closer resemblance to the short, undulating, and testing layout the drivers face today.