Surviving the British Grand Prix
Are you going to Silverstone for the British Grand Prix this year?
That's a coincidence, so am I. And being the kind hearted soul that I am, I thought I would share some of my pearls of wisdom for making it through the big weekend.
Feel free to chip in with any tidbits of information you think I may have missed...
Friday
Friday is when the spectator banks aren’t quite so rammed, and it’s when some of the most enjoyable moments of the weekend can happen.
While the majority of folk are busy at work, you can walk relatively unhindered around the track and be wowed at Copse, Becketts and Stowe. As well as hours of F1 free practice, there’s some GP2 qualifying for you to enjoy.
Oh, and make sure you walk anti-clockwise around the circuit. Better to have the cars coming towards you than having your back to them.
Get there nice and early
The good news is that even on a general admission ticket, there are still some good vantage points to be found – but you will need to get up at the crack of sparrows to grab them.
Not only does this ensure that you have a pitch that doesn’t require a contortionist’s feat of neck-cricking to see anything, but it also means you’re certain of catching some of the excellent support races. GP3, Porsche Supercup and the reverse-top-eight GP2 sprint races are likely to provide some decent action in the lead up to the main event.
Maggots
Head for this corner at some point during the course of the weekend. There are better places to watch the race from, but the outside of Maggots is where you will see and hear an F1 car pushed to the limit, and you don’t even need an expensive grandstand ticket to see it either.
Cool box
These bulky horrible looking things can be a life saver.
Imagine it: it’s midday Sunday and there’s a decision to be made. Having arrived at the crack of sparrows to stake your claim in a decent spot, you have minutes to go before the race starts. While at 6am you were shivering like mad, the temperature has risen and you’re now sweating buckets. Only an over-priced burger and beer will do. But you want to keep your sacred patch. What to do?!!
Should have brought a cool box along with you, that’s what. Ram it full of beverages and various treats. You’ll save yourself time negotiating the maze of stands and your wallet will love you as well.
When the race starts, you can then just hop on top of your box, obstructing the idiot who has been annoying you all morning, and get a better view of the action. Tada!
Sunscreen
It never amazes me to see the number of painfully pink-looking people dotted around the circuit each year. Even if it is overcast (which it will probably be), there’s no sense in taking any chances with the sun.
As the circuit is built upon what was once a wartime airfield, it is out in the open, and as such, the wind has a good habit of masking the fact you are slowly sizzling away.
Umbrella.
It’s Britain. Take one.
Camping
It’s probably too late to advise you not to bother, but heed my advice when it comes to next year’s race.
Access to Silverstone along the A43 is actually pretty good, so it’s easy to commute from nearby towns like Bicester, Aylesbury, or the roundabout laden metropolis that is Milton Keynes. You’ll enjoy hot running water and a nice comfy bed, as opposed to looking like you’ve spent the weekend with the Territorial Army.
Queues
One of the biggest drawbacks to visiting the grand prix is the massive queues to get out of the car park as quickly as possible after the race. Even though the nearby road network was vastly improved some years ago, it can still take a couple of hours to get out of the car park alone.
So instead of baking inside your Fiesta waiting to reach asphalt, you could dive into the middle of the circuit for the traditional ‘Grand Prix Party’ for a few hours, where no doubt Eddie Jordan will be taking to the mic once again...
On second thoughts, probably a better idea to bring a bicycle along and chain it to anything solid while you watch the racing. Jump back on it in double-quick time when it’s all over, and you’ll be back in your car and off down the road while everybody else is still packing away their deckchairs.
The Grand Prix Priest
Who can forget Irish priest Neil Horan running up the Hangar Straight in 2003?
On paper the 2003 British Grand Prix looks like a fairly ordinary race. Rubens Barrichello qualified in his Ferrari in pole position, and then went on to win the race by just over five seconds. But as afternoons go, this was anything other than straightforward.
Formula 1's spectators are rather renowned for their passion and for also wearing outlandish clothes in support of their favourite teams or drivers. But on July 20 2003, someone wearing a green and white top, kilt, and bright green socks might have seemed a little bit peculiar.
Down by the Hangar Straight, former priest Cornelius "Neil" Horan, 56, was preparing to ignore the terms and conditions on his entry ticket which mentions that motor racing can be extremely dangerous. Carrying a banner which read: "Read the bible, it's always right!" Horan leapt over the safety barrier on lap 12, before legging it towards the oncoming traffic.
As he embarked upon his protest, Jaguar Racing's new boy Mark Webber, was coming out of the extremely quick Becketts section and was on a collision course with the beret wearing nutter.
"As I came onto the straight I saw what I thought was a piece of bodywork on the track," recalls Webber. "One second later I decided that it wasn't a bit of car and a second after that I realised it was a person."
"I simply couldn't believe what I was seeing. I wasn't particularly worried about what might happen to the idiot on the track. I was more concerned about the other drivers and the effect on any kids watching if a car did hit him. That was absolutely my first thought. It's the kind of incident you don't forget."
The Aussie racer managed to dodge Horan, who was tackled to the ground by Silverstone marshal Stephen Green. Once dragged to safety, he was was taken away to nearby police cells.
In the meantime the safety car was deployed and dropped Barrichello back down the order to eighth. What happened next was a rather brilliant recovery drive in which he passed Raikkonen for the lead on lap 42 and took his sixth grand prix win. Sadly, most people remember the race less for Barrichello's performance and more for the antics of a complete and utter loon.
Horan served two months for his crazy behaviour that day, but that didn't stop his appetite for causing all manner of havoc. He was arrested again the following year at the 2004 Epsom Derby horse race when police reasonably assumed that he was like to run onto the course. A few months later he travelled abroad to Athens and impeded Olympic marathon leader Vanderlei de Lima, who struggled to break free, but then lost his advantage and finished third. His last one-man protest was thwarted at the 2006 FIFA World Cup where he was arrested by police once again.
And the message he was so desperate for us to see? He believes that the end of the world is nigh. If Stephen Green hadn’t taken him down five years ago, his prophecy might have been self-fulfilling.
F1 mid-season review in 500 words
(Keen to see my name in lights, I recently submitted an article to The Red Bull Reporter website in an attempt to become a scribe at this year's British Grand Prix.
The task was simple: write a 300-500 word mid-season review of the F1 season thus far.
Except, you soon realise that the 500 word limit doesn’t give much room for manoeuvre, and well, I hope they weren't looking for a particularly pro-Red Bull piece.
Nevermind. Rather than see it become lost in a sea of submissions, I'm just going to press CTRL+C, followed by CTRL+V and plonk it on here...)
It looked like normal service had been resumed at the season opener in Bahrain, with new Prancing Horseman Fernando Alonso taking first blood, as a spark plug hobbled Sebastian Vettel’s Red Bull.
But while the old guard of Ferrari and McLaren occupied the three steps of the podium at Sakhir, it has been Red Bull who has managed to fizz their way up the field, leaving the other teams to play catch up.
With some heavyweight technical folk and a well-balanced line-up, the Milton Keynes-based squad has once again produced a rocket ship of car that has managed to claim pole position in seven of the eight races so far this season.
Race results tell a different story however. With a spate of technical issues hindering performance early on in the year and a well documented coming together in Turkey throwing 28 points down the drain. You have to wonder if, come the end of the season, Red Bull won’t be ruing these costly issues when it comes to either championship.
As it stands, McLaren heads both the drivers’ and constructors’ tables after having much the momentum in recent weeks. With the aid of their potent Mercedes engine and much imitated f-duct facility, Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button have always been in the mix, ready to haul in the points when those around them are falling to pieces.
Both have driven brilliantly all season and have not put a single foot wrong on a Sunday afternoon. With two wins apiece and no signs of an intra team rivalry about to split the garage in two, the Woking crew has recently come knocking on Red Bull’s door, and should be poised to launch an all-out offensive at the British Grand Prix.
But what of Ferrari? They started in the best way possible scoring a 1-2, but then appeared to quickly go off the boil, much like the four Bridgestones bolted on either corner of the F10, which has struggled to generate sufficient heat in them this year.
But sleeping dogs don’t lie for too long. Ferrari has been working tirelessly, in an attempt to close the gap to Red Bull and they took a step closer this weekend at Valenica with the introduction of the exhaust-blown diffuser.
Figures being bandied about suggest that this feature provides a massive 0.6s-0.7s advantage, and as such, everyone is busy preparing to introduce their own versions (with Renault, Mercedes, Williams and McLaren to follow on at Silverstone).
The race is on to implement what has been an intrinsic part of the season’s fastest car, the Red Bull RB6. Obviously Red Bull will continue to develop hard, but is there 0.6s worth of development left in the design? Might Red Bull not already have blown its chances of taking the title, only scoring four wins from eight races?
With three teams still in contention of producing the next world champion, F1 is in an exciting state at the moment and finely poised to produce a cracking finale.
The 1987 Austrian Grand Prix was anything but dull
What had started out as a trawl of the Internet to find footage of Murray Walker poking Nigel Mansell’s bruised bonce, quickly became a fact finding mission into the 1987 Austrian Grand Prix.
Remember that? It featured three starts, a stray deer, disqualification, and of course a bruised driver. Yup, the 1987 Austrian Grand Prix was anything but dull.
As circuits go, the Osterreichring was a bit of a gem. Located in Austria’s Styrian foothills, it was picturesque and demanding in equal measure. Its long straights were linked by fast sweeping bends, which were big on commitment and short on run-off.
In qualifying for the event, Nelson Piquet clocked up an average of 159mph (256kph) in his Williams FW11B-Honda to secure pole position, but the race didn’t go quite so smoothly as his qualifying lap...
Take 1.
Piquet had a decent start and led the way up to the Hella-Licht Chicane, but a pile-up had developed behind him.
“It was Martin Brundle’s fault,” said Christian Danner, Brundle’s Zakspeed team-mate. Brundle put his hands up and took full responsibility for the incident. “I was on the right side of the track and hit a big bump. With a heavy fuel load, my car simply ran out of suspension travel and turned left. I hit the barrier and bounced back into the pack.”
This sparked a collision which caught Ligier’s René Arnoux and Piercarlo Ghinzani, Adrian Campos in the Minardi and the Tyrells of Jonathan Palmer and Philippe Streiff.
Take 2.
It took almost 45 minutes to clean up the mess before the race could start again – just enough time for the teams to gather enough spare parts (or spare cars) for a full grid.
Once again, Piquet quickly moved away, but team-mate Nigel Mansell was much slower on the other side and due to the circuit’s narrow nature, created a traffic jam behind him.
As a result, Riccardo Patrese (Brabham) brushed wheels with Eddie Cheever (Arrows) and McLaren’s Stefan Johansson (who had cracked a rib, after he crashed into a stray deer during practice) found himself with nowhere to go.
Cue even more chaos.
The Zakspeeds were lured into the incident, as was almost everyone at the back of the grid. Alex Caffi (Osella), Ivan Capelli (March), Philippe Alliot (Larrousse Lola), Pascal Fabre (AGS), Ghinzani, and, again, both Tyrell drivers were involved.
The track was so cramped that there was no chance escape for any of them. Capelli recalls: “I managed to bring my car to a halt, but when I saw Pascal Fabre go flying and he landed on top of my roll-hoop, which fortunately protected me.”
Take 3.
Finally, at 16.12, one hour and 42 minutes after the original scheduled start, the Austrian Grand Prix began in earnest (minus only Streiff, remarkably). Mansell won for Williams... and then banged his head on a bridge stanchion as the victory car took him on a lap of honour.
To make matters even worse, motor racing commentator Murray Walker asked Mansell how he felt... then poked Mansell’s bruised head as he pointed it out to the viewers at home.
This was the last Austrian Grand Prix for 10 years. When the F1 circus returned in 1997, the track was widened, halved in length and renamed the A1-Ring after its sponsor.
The race remained until 2003, when money and politics ended its reign. But word is that Red Bull magnate Dietrich Mateschitz has visions of opening the A1-Ring up for business again next year, where it will hopefully play host to the WTCC and Formula Renault series.
“The original track was brilliant,” says Brundle, “but I didn’t think that in 1987. By the third start my car was bent and I needed 30-degree steering just to keep it straight. It was the last place you wanted to be in that situation. The Zakspeed almost always broke down, but I was sitting there thinking ‘Break, damn you, break’ and for once it kept going.”
It was only one of four races that Brundle finished that year – but it didn’t count. The Zakspeed apparently broke bodywork regulations and the stewards later stripped him of 14th place.
So yeah, the 1987 Austrian Grand Prix was anything but dull!
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