Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
Formula 1 returned to the home race of many of the teams in the series last weekend with the British Grand Prix. Yet again this season, we have seen the fastest car not win a race, as reliability has been an issue. But racing gives and racing takes away, and the beneficiary of one driver’s misfortune was another driver who really needed that win. Perhaps the biggest issue, however, was the unfulfilled expectation that we could see a late restart after the safety car came out on lap 48 of 52. A message on the screen told commentators and observers that this would be the case, but it was shown incorrectly, and what was an exciting race ended like something of a wet squib.
Silverstone, like many British racetracks, was a World War II battlefield before it was decommissioned, which means it’s flat and windy. It’s very fast even in its current form (which was updated in 2010), with corners in some of the best places in the world to see how an F1 car changes. There were concerns that the new cars would find their hybrid power and hunger for power slowly around the track, and in qualifying, the cars were less able to recover and send 6.5 MJ on the nose, compared to 8 MJ per foot that was allowed in the sprint and the main race.
The qualifying power was just right – unlike at Suzuka in Japan, where we saw the woes of cars going downhill at the 130R corner, qualifying drivers looked vulnerable through corners like Copse, Maggotts, and Becketts.
