3 August 2020 15:45 (UTC)
Find out more about what went down at the British GP
At the end of lap 48, the British Grand Prix was looking very good. Four laps later, at the chequered flag, it was a shellshocked garage that began to pick up the pieces. First Lando lost position to Daniel Ricciardo after a titanic, race-long scrap, and then Carlos suffered the cruellest of fates with a puncture on the penultimate lap.
Under other circumstances, 10 points for fifth would be a decent result; under these circumstances, and after a busy, hard weekend, it wasn’t quite enough – but at least we get another go next Sunday. Here’s a few things you may have missed during our first weekend at Silverstone…
Friday morning saw the team carrying out plenty of development work. The MCL35s had a new floor and wings bolted to the car and were festooned with pressure sensors and slathered in luminous flo-vis paint. They worked out well, and the drivers reported a better feeling with the car – though it took a lot of analysis over the weekend to locate the sweet spot.
While the locations change, the order of the garages in the paddock – for the most part – does not, fixed according to the final Constructors’ Championship table from the previous season. This year we’re – usually – located between Red Bull and Renault but Silverstone is quirky. Because a great swathe of the pitlane isn’t visible from the grandstand opposite, the order gets switched around. We had Red Bull to our left as usual, but Williams to our right. There’s always a little bit of negotiation to do with new neighbours – you wouldn’t, for instance, want to be doing pitstop practice at the same time – but as usual, away from competition, the F1 paddock is a very cooperative place in which to work.
Another quirk of the Silverstone pitlane is that, in places, it’s very tight. The first time out of the garage on Friday morning the drivers were nervous about hitting the retaining wall opposite the garage. The engineers aren’t worried – width of the narrowest pitlanes are one of the parameters that’s fed into the design of the steering rack – but even with that reassurance Carlos and Lando, who can’t see the front of the car – still edged around in a manner that will be familiar to anyone who’s ever driven around a multi-storey car park in a vehicle that’s a bit too big for the ramps…
Silverstone has an unearned reputation for rain. More often than not, the weather condition of note is the wind. The things that made Silverstone an excellent location for an airfield – on top of a very open plateau – can make it a tricky place to race cars. There’s little protection on a windy day, and this weekend was very windy. An unfortunately-timed gust – or a sudden moment of calm – have a big impact through the incredibly fast corners on the ragged edge of grip. Both drivers had a torrid time negotiating practice and qualifying in conditions that changed elements of the circuit every lap.
Britain isn’t known for its heatwaves, but if you’re going to get one, the end of July/start of August is when it’s going to happen. Friday duly obliged, being England’s third-hottest day on record, hitting 37.8°C at Heathrow – F1’s record stands at 38.7°C, when we were even hotter at Hockenheim in July last year. Given how hard Silverstone pushes tyres in even benign conditions, the soaring track temperatures made long runs on Friday very difficult, with drivers up and down the grid struggling to get more than a couple of laps out of the Soft tyre before they grained and then blistered.
Most of the time, the good qualifying sessions are the ones that are calm and progressive: car and driver steadily improving across the hour. The British GP wasn’t like that at all. The cars weren’t ready to go until a few minutes after the start of the session, during which the wind and flags had a habit of disrupting the laps. Carlos managed to improve on each run in Q1 and Q2 without ever pronouncing himself truly happy with the lap. Lando, meanwhile, flirted with disaster, failing to improve on his second run in either session. Q3, in comparison, seemed magical: everything suddenly slotted into place. The drivers got clean laps and delivered really strong times, as though the previous 55 minutes hadn’t happened.
Who are we fighting this year? That’s still a very good question. At times over the first four races we’ve been embroiled in a battle with Racing Point and Ferrari, while at other times, we haven’t. The one consistent data point has been that things are very, very tight between ourselves and Renault. Sunday’s race suggested it’s not simply a case of who has the advantage on a particular track but rather who has an advantage on a specific tyre or individual stint. And having the same engine also takes another variable out of the mix. The British GP was particularly interesting because the relative advantage moved around the lap, which made for a good mix of attack and defence.
Back-to-back races are hectic: under normal circumstances. It’s a flat-out sprint from circuit to circuit, diving directly into garage build, car strip and rebuild, with barely a moment’s pause. There are few idle hours, much less idle days. This year’s a bit different. Between the Austrian Grands Prix, with no travel day or garage build, most of the team had time to go for a walk – which was all they were allowed to do. Here at Silverstone, everyone went home on Sunday evening. The first group will be back at the circuit on Tuesday, with others arriving on Wednesday and Thursday. It’s an unusual situation – but not an unpleasant one.
