british grand prix

My dad and sister went to the British grand prix.

I didn't.  I couldn't really afford it, both in terms of finances and time.  Finances because I'm hopeless at managing them and time because even when the idea was proposed I was planning to look for a new job and new I'd need the days leave for that.

As it turns out I think I was somewhat fortunate.  The weather has been particularly dreadful and on Saturday (Qualifying day) they were turning people away from the parking as the hard-standing areas were already full and they wanted to give the soft-standing areas time to dry out a bit.

Silverstone is quite an exposed track.  Like many of the UK's racing circuits it's an old airfield and as you'd imagine, you generally want to put airfields in nice open areas so there's nothing for the pilots to crash into.

There are stands, of course, and they can be good for keeping you out of the wind and rain, although this can depend quite heavily on direction.  I recall one year sitting in the stand and still getting wet and cold because the rain was driving into the front of the stand.

Anyway - the race itself.

It was a really good one.  The British Grand Prix can occasionally produce a duffer.  The problem is that it's pretty high speed, and overtaking normally only tends to be associated with technical sections (people make mistakes) and high speed straight into slow-speed corner.

Anyway, this was a good one and part of it came from my old theory about how, if you want to produce good races a good way to achieve it is to randomise the field (a draw like in football cups, for example).  If there was a lottery-style draw you end up with lots of fast cars out of position so you tend to get overtaking.

F1 is a trickier case for this idea as some circuits overtaking is extremely difficult (Monaco and other street circuits) and the cars are heavily dependent on down force, which makes getting close to the guy in front difficult, since you drive into his turbulent air and your own down force is less effective.

Nowadays of course we've had some counters to that - you've got DRS and KERS to help with overtaking and the rules changed so little since last year that it's made everything closer.

This is another element for F1 - they bugger about with the rules a lot.  But then this is swings and roundabouts - they bugger about with them because people find ways to exploit them and these often need ruling out.

But yes, we ended up with a cracking race, although the McLarens didn't do much - it comes across like they've been struggling to really push the car forward.  They started out with the best car at the start, but failed to capitalise it, partly due to a few too many human errors.  Now everyone else seems to have developed the car so they're at the same level if not a bit quicker, where the McLaren seems to have stagnated.