Quick, quick, slow – dancing around the hallowed asphalt of Silverstone, bumps and all, demands much thought and delicate compromises from the tip of the car to its tail
WORDS MATT YOUSON PICTURES AND SILVERSTONE
THERE ARE SEVERAL THINGS BRITAIN still does very well: a proper bacon sandwich; a well-organised queue; a high-speed FIA Grade One circuit. There aren’t many venues on the calendar that challenge a Formula 1 car across the full range of its capabilities – but Silverstone occupies an exalted position within the handful that do. It tests the bravery of the driver as it does the dark arts of the designer. The skillset of the race engineer also gets thoroughly worked over too.
The circuit mods in 2010, designed to make Silverstone more bike-friendly, created a more nuanced Arena layout for F1 cars. Instead of being a high-speed monster it became a high-speed monster… with some really complicated slow bits. The bluff, old traditionalists may choke on their cucumber sandwiches but making a safer, more modern circuit also made it better. It still has that ragged-edge joy of seeing an F1 car on the absolute limit through the ultra-fast changes of direction at Maggotts-Becketts-Chapel; it still has thunderous velocity through Copse, Stowe and Abbey… but it’s the slow corners of Vale and Club, Village and The Loop where the lap is made or lost. The high-speed stuff isn’t to be ignored, but the stupid-huge amounts of downforce the ’22 technical regs deliver mean this isn’t the Alpha and Omega anymore. It’s now a circuit for balls and brains.
It’s been a while since Tom McCullough was a race engineer tasked with setting up a car to tame Silverstone’s challenges – but Aston Martin’s performance director has a fine view of the circuit from his team’s shiny new technology campus over the road. Setup, he says, is very much a question of deciding which concessions to make.
“It’s a real challenge,” he says, “because these modern cars don’t want favour of medium downforce. The track is very power-sensitive and, while TV will undoubtedly describe Copse in tones verging on the near-hysterical, on a qualifying lap it’s not quite the maximum-effort corner it once was.
“The modern generation of F1 car produces so much downforce in the high-speed that Silverstone has become a lower and lower-drag circuit as the efficiency of the circuit has gone up,” says McCullough. “Copse is easy-flat. It’s all about reducing drag in qualifying. There’s a lot of full-throttle time, so
