Given football refused to come home and cricket appears to be reluctant to do so, the British sporting public can at least rest easy knowing Formula 1 will once again return to the place that started it all in Silverstone.
The British Grand Prix is the oldest race on the calendar and always high on the list of favourites. Raced around one of modern F1’s most challenging circuits and often hitting that one-week sweet spot in July where summer turns up in England, it has a habit of delivering cracking races and interesting stories.
The packed grandstands ensure the atmosphere is always bubbling, helped along by the presence of so many strong British drivers on the grid.
Several of them have much to race for this weekend.
Lewis Hamilton and George Russell’s Mercedes is determined to make amends for a poor weekend in Austria to prove its revised car can be the real deal.
Lando Norris’s McLaren has been buoyed by its massive Spielberg upgrade and is eager to find out where exactly it now sits in the pecking order.
And depending on how well they do, there could be more than expected up for grabs this weekend.
You’d be very, very brave to bet against Red Bull Racing and Max Verstappen at any weekend this season, but if there’s a track on the calendar where bad luck haunts the team, it’s Silverstone, just 30 minutes from its doorstep in Milton Keynes.
The top teams all have a surprising amount on the line this weekend.
CAN RED BULL RACING BREAK ITS SILVERSTONE HOODOO AND EQUAL A RECORD?
Maybe you think Red Bull Racing is unbeatable in 2023. The British Grand Prix may beg to differ.
Despite the reigning constructors champion’s formidable win rate since it first started collecting victories in 2009, it has a surprisingly poor history at its home race.
Red Bull Racing has won in Silverstone just four times and only once in the last decade, that last triumph coming at the hands of Max Verstappen in the one-off 70th Anniversary Grand Prix.
If you want to get technical about your superstitions, the team hasn’t won a British Grand Prix since 2012 — Mark Webber’s final victory in F1.
The first nine races of this season have been dominated by the question of whether anyone can prevent Red Bull Racing from sweeping the season, and it’s been asked with increasing urgency and volume.
Perhaps the better question is whether any track can intervene.
On paper there’s no reason for Red Bull Racing to fear Silverstone. It’s a fast circuit that rewards aerodynamically efficient cars that can pile on downforce without hurting straight-line speed. That’s the RB19 all over.
And even if this weren’t theoretically one of the team’s strongest circuits, its advantage has been so massive this year that it shouldn’t be that concerned anyway.
And yet many of those same strengths have been true in previous seasons and the wins haven’t been forthcoming.
Let’s consider the history.
In 2010 Red Bull Racing lost a front-row lockout to Fernando Alonso via a very rare pit stop error.
In 2013, a dominant campaign, Sebastian Vettel retired from the lead with a gearbox issue and Webber was punted off track by Romain Grosjean.
In 2020 Verstappen missed a chance to inherit a victory from Lewis Hamilton because he’d made a precautionary late pit stop moment before the Briton’s tyre exploded.
In 2021 that infamous flashpoint with Hamilton sent pole-starter Verstappen into the barrier at Copse at 290 kilometres per hour.
Finally, in 2022 Verstappen was taken out of the lead thanks to floor damage picked up by running over debris.
That’s a lot of bad luck for one team at one track.
There’s a little extra spice about it all this weekend too given Red Bull Racing has a shot at equalling McLaren’s record for 11 straight victories set in 1988.
Five times since then a team has made it to 10 wins but gone no further.
So is Red Bull Racing’s momentum irresistible, or is it about to meet an immovable object?
HOW MUCH OF THE MCLAREN UPGRADE WILL PIASTRI GET?
There was no surprise winner in Austria, and even the podium composition was of limited shock value.
But Lando Norris in fourth place? That was certainly unexpected.
Of course the Briton has always gone well at the Red Bull Ring, and McLaren’s typically done well too, but Norris was wielding his massively upgraded MCL60 for the first time, and by all accounts the team was very pleased with how well it went.
“I was a bit nervous coming into the race really, honestly, that the race pace was going to let us down a lot,” Norris said, per Racer. “But actually it was better than I was expecting, which is a good surprise.”
Notable was that Norris delivered a far stronger result than teammate Oscar Piastri, who was stuck with the old-spec car.
Some of the difference was exaggerated by Piastri having his Q3-bound qualifying lap deleted for track limits, but by the same token you can argue he had to push harder to get close to Norris given his inferior car.
He won’t need to wonder this weekend — probably, anyway.
McLaren was supposed to bring the Austria upgrade to Silverstone, but it pulled out all stops to have one car ready a weekend early.
That same race against time is hanging over the second phase of the three-stage upgrade due this weekend.
The team is confident Piastri will field the first set up upgrades Norris ran last weekend, but it isn’t sure whether the Aussie will get the full Silverstone specification with this week’s new parts.
It shouldn’t bother Piastri too much. The first stage of the upgrade is the biggest chunk, reckoned to be around 50 per cent of the changes. The second step is figured to be around a 25 per cent overhaul. The third stage is now likely to arrive in smaller parts before and after the mid-season break.
Regardless of what configuration of new parts Piastri will have, he’ll provide an important benchmark for the upgrade at a circuit that really challenges aerodynamics.
Where McLaren shakes out — among the frontrunners, as in Austria, or in the battle with Alpine — will be fascinating and potentially change the dynamic between the teams in the second half of the season.
CAN FERRARI MAKE IT THREE GOOD RACES IN A ROW?
For two races in succession Ferrari has scored some pretty good results.
Okay, had strategy been executed better in qualifying in Canada, it could’ve celebrated some podiums rather than just some astute tactics that delivered a solid recovery.
And in Austria Carlos Sainz felt aggrieved, and fairly, for being dudded by an early double-stack stop that cost him bucketloads of time over the race.
But that’s just Ferrari stuff. The good news is that in both races the car looked quick, following a serious upgrade brought in Barcelona and another set of new bits last weekend.
The team is increasingly optimistic the worst of its race-pace and tyre-degradation woes are behind it and it can start focusing on closing the gap — which was almost 25 seconds before Verstappen made that final pit stop in Austria.
There’s no place like Silverstone to test that theory.
This is one of the hardest tracks on tyres on the entire calendar — so much so that Pirelli has brought forward its sturdier 2024 tyre construction to this race to guarantee there’ll be no problems when the rubber hits the road.
The tyre company rates Silverstone at the very extreme end of the scale for tyre stress and lateral force through the high-speed corners. It is the acid test for tyre wear.
If Ferrari can get through Silverstone competitively, it’ll be unequivocal proof that things are finally getting back on course in Maranello.
WILL MERCEDES STILL BELIEVE AFTER SUNDAY?
Mercedes is still struggling to definitively break out of its new-regulation slump, and the British Grand Prix will be a big test of how much progress it’s made in turning the ship around.
The team brought its philosophy-changing upgrade to Monaco and enjoyed much stronger form at the following rounds in Barcelona and Canada.
The uncertainty of the previous model car with its unpredictable behaviour had appeared to have disappeared, and the team felt confident it was on the right track.
But the unexpected downturn at the Austrian Grand Prix was a blow.
Mercedes was beaten by two of its three customer teams, with Lando Norris and Fernando Alonso both taking the flag comfortably ahead of Hamilton, even before his post-race penalty was applied.
Over team radio Hamilton complained of enormous understeer — so bad that it was a major contributor to his counts of exceeding track limits.
“I definitely didn’t expect to be as bad as we were,” Hamilton admitted after the race. “I don’t really have an answer for it.
“But the feeling of the car was very much the same as the feeling I’ve had all last year, so in that respect it’s not the biggest surprise.”
For Mercedes fans who suffered through so many false dawns last season, that probably sounds alarming.
There are asterisks on Austria, though. The team didn’t expect the combination of corners at the Red Bull Ring to suit its car — in fact the Spielberg track has always been something of a bogey venue for the Silver Arrows — plus the sprint weekend meant it had only one practice session to set up what is still a relatively new aero package.
But the pressure is on this weekend, where the team is bringing what could be termed its first true performance upgrade — new parts targeted at bringing pace rather than solving problems, as it had been doing for the last 18 months or so.
If the car can get back onto its positive trajectory at a track that should suit its core characteristics, then Austria can be easily written off as just one of those weekends that it, Ferrari and Aston Martin have all experienced in pursuit of Red Bull Racing this season.
But if it were to be way off the pace again, and particularly if it were to be beaten by two customers a second time in a row, a little consternation may start creeping in at Brackley.
HOW CAN I WATCH IT?
The British Grand Prix is live an ad-break free during racing on Kayo and Fox Sports.
Practice starts on Friday at 9:30pm (AEST) followed by second practice on Saturday at 1:00am.
Final practice takes places at 8:30pm Saturday, with qualifying at midnight Sunday morning.
Pre-race coverage starts at 10:30pm Sunday, with lights out for the British Grand Prix at midnight Monday morning.
