7 March 2023 16:02 (UTC)
A closer look at the 70th Anniversary GP weekend
A 70th anniversary is supposed to be platinum, but our weekend at Silverstone was encapsulated in a rather more base material. We made a very strong start to the season but things have settled down now, everyone has a handle on their cars and we’re into the meat of what promises to be a hard-fought scrap for the rest of the year.
Here are a few things you may have missed from the 70th Anniversary Grand Prix weekend.
Friday practice isn’t quite the voyage of discovery when you go into it having already completed 1,700 km at the circuit the previous week. With a very comfortable amount of aero data on board, the trackside team were able to do away with the usual FP1 aero tests and get straight into set-up work. Most of that is fine-tuning the car with experiments based on observations of last week’s pace; the rest is studying where potential rivals were strong and seeking to nullify that.
While the aero didn’t change from one week to the next, the tyres most certainly did. Silverstone was tough on the rubber during the British Grand Prix and going one step softer made it incredibly difficult – especially with no choice in the allocation this year. Everyone had five very valuable sets of Hard and Medium tyres and eight sets of Soft tyres that weren’t suitable for the race, and possibly not optimum for qualifying either. Thus, both Carlos and Lando ran the Soft tyres exclusively on Friday, getting them out of the allocation as soon as possible. That’s never happened before.
There are tracks – Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez and Yas Marina last year being prime examples – where failing to get out of Q2 with the opportunity to start on a harder, new tyre is preferable to being at the back-end of the top 10 on a used Soft tyre. Silverstone this weekend was the least ambiguous example of this phenomenon F1 has ever seen – and thus almost everyone went into qualifying assuming they would either make Q3 on a Medium tyre or fail in the attempt. Both Carlos and Lando had saved two sets of new Medium tyres specifically for that purpose. This, again, was a unique circumstance.
At the British Grand Prix, the team had a surprisingly good result from a very difficult qualifying session. This week, the preparation was much smoother – but the result was not as good. Lando made it through to Q3 and qualified tenth, while Carlos qualified 13th and was unable to join him in the final session – the first time we’ve had an elimination in 2020. Neither driver made a mistake: the qualifying positions were a reasonable reflection of the pace in the car. There were some shrugs around the garage after the session: execution had been fine, that’s simply where we were.
The 70th Anniversary Grand Prix was notable for many reasons, not least of which was the eye-opening sight of drivers continuing to lap on tyres that, any other weekend, would have them urgently called into the pitlane. Both Carlos and Lando picked up heavy blistering as it seemed did most of the other drivers. Lando also picked up a lot of vibration in his second stint, radioing in that it was so bad he could barely see the track. In the end the team left him out longer than would normally be prudent but not as long as they wanted. The tyres that came off the car looked like they’d been chewed by a bear.
There really wasn’t time to dwell on the result at Silverstone. The moment the race finished – actually sometime before that for the garage technicians not involved in pit-stops – everyone donned their high-vis vests and began the pack-down. Back-to-back races at Silverstone has been something of a luxury, but the schedule to get everything on the road and reassembled at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, 1,600 km away, is exceptionally tight. There was time for doughnuts, though.
McLaren HomeFest was a thing you couldn’t miss, rather than one of those ‘things you might have missed’. During his live afterparty set hosted by VELO, legendary DJ Carl Cox hollered the words: “HomeFest massive!” And that’s exactly what F1’s greatest virtual fan festival turned out to be. It captured the imagination and saw fans around the world get into the Silverstone spirit as we brought the circuit’s famous atmosphere to them. The digital and social hills were well and truly alive to the sound of papaya as we proved that just because a grand prix takes place behind closed doors, it doesn’t mean we can’t bring fans even closer to the action.
