british grand prix

Well now - that was eventful!

It was the British Grand Prix this weekend, and it was quite the race, both for good reasons and bad.

The BBC showed the full race, obviously, and that meant they showed all the practice and qualifying too.  However, when I got back on Friday I had a bit of a shock as my PVR had failed to record the Friday stuff.  Indeed, it seemed to have stopped recording anything from Thursday evening.

I’ve had it do that occasionally before, though this time it stopped recording after I switched it off, rather than doing it while it was on standby.  I managed to get at most of everything I lost via repeats, so no harm in the end.

The practice on Friday was unfortunately wet and because the forecast was for the weekend to be nice so they didn’t do much running.  Qualifying was good as Hamilton ended up on pole, but unfortunately the Ferraris were rather poor.

But the main event was the race itself, which given some people seemed out of position meant there was probably going to be some overtaking.  Well there was plenty of overtaking- sometimes Silverstone can produce some dull races and sometimes some great ones.  Overtaking is possible, but not easy.

However, the race was also eventful for other reasons as apparently 6 Pirelli tyres failed.  Four of these were caught on camera and all were basically catastrophic failures.  I was a bit weird, actually.  They’ve had several tyre failures in previous races this year, but this is the first where it’s happened repeatedly.

All the failures were spectacular and it’s really just a matter of luck and skill that there were no serious accidents.  It’s a shame, really, as Pirelli did such a good job when they came into the sport of adding interest with the tyres, but for whatever reason all the coverage will be quite negative from this, I’m sure.

There’s a chance that the cause of the failures was them being cut on the curbs.  The cuts would have been on the side of the tyre and because Silverstone is the first proper circuit with lots of fast corners that’s why there have been so many.  However, the tyres should have been able to take it - it’s not like they’ve never raced there before!

The real shame of it was it messed with the results of the race - Hamilton was the first to get one and it meant he ended up fourth, and others obviously suffered too.

One of the problems is that they obviously want something to be done, but the next race is only a week away and they will probably have already shipped the tyres (or made them at the least).  There’s a more decent gap after that, and the nature of the next race (German) is that if it is down to the high-speed corners it will be less of an issue.