How beastly and brutal Silverstone bit back at the British Grand Prix

On Saturday, Lewis Hamilton had once more tamed Silverstone’s sweeping high-speed corners. His 1.24.303 in qualifying was another ultimate lap record, three tenths ahead of team-mate Valtteri Bottas, putting him on course for his sixth British Grand Prix victory in seven years. He made it look easy.

A day later, it was another serene performance from both Mercedes drivers after 49 of 52 laps, with Hamilton always that little bit ahead. Their rivals were nowhere.

But then on lap 50, Silverstone bit back in dramatic fashion. First Bottas’s front left tyre went, dropping him out of the points, his championship hopes deflating in a similar fashion. Fourth-placed Carlos Sainz was Silverstone’s next victim with an identical issue. Finally — and most dramatically — Hamilton’s race was nearly ruined as his front left tyre gave up on the last lap. He lost nearly 30 seconds to second-placed Verstappen’s charging Red Bull on the final tour but kept his head to nurse his car over the line in an astonishing finish.

One question is whether Verstappen would have won had he not stopped for fresh tyres and tried to claim the fastest lap bonus point? Of course, he would have. The bigger question was whether that was the correct decision from Red Bull? Yes and no. In the circumstances, they were taking the best opportunity to maximise their result and that is understandable.

The fastest lap point was a near-certainty, but Hamilton’s tyre failing was a more remote chance, but still a possibility. Given their performance deficit to Mercedes this year maybe they should have kept him out. What is an extra point to a team that will comfortably finish second in the constructors’ championship compared to a race win? On current form it will take a freak event for them to win a race this year. Sunday threw up something in their favour, but the chance was not taken.

From a perspective of safety, events like this are thankfully rare.  But the unpredictable is what F1 fans live for. Although they had to wait for it on Sunday, when it came it delivered one of the most remarkable finishes to a Grand Prix in recent memory. After 50 laps of monotony out front it felt satisfying to see this storied track get its revenge on the current breed of machines.

The 2020 F1 cars are gigantic, powerful beasts — the Northamptonshire circuit is beastly in another way. It is still a thrill, but over recent years its legendary high-speed corners have been neutered by the ultra high-downforce, turbo-powered machines. Corners that were once true tests of a driver’s skill and bravery have become full-throttle non-events.

Nowhere is this more obvious than the once fearsome sequence of super-fast corners in the middle of the lap. The 90-degree right-hander of Copse requires barely a dab of the brake and no longer any downshift. Top gear is maintained all the way through the first part of the left-right-left combination of Maggots and Becketts. A downshift or two is needed before darting out onto the Hangar Straight. The succeeding Stowe corner is dangerously close to becoming a non-braking event in qualifying trim.

Simply, the difficulty of executing the perfect lap around Silverstone’s 3.66 miles is a lot simpler than it was 20 or even 10 years ago, and with a lot less jeopardy. Look at Hamilton’s most recent Silverstone pole lap for Mercedes this year and compare it to his first for the team in 2013.  The speeds the 2020 cars can carry through the apex are mind-blowing and have increased hugely in the last decade — in 2013 the minimum speed in Stowe was around 128mph. This year it was nudging 150. Go back to the 1990s and the difference is even more profound.

On a track like this bravery and skill could give you bags of lap time. Nigel Mansell’s qualifying lap in 1992 in the monstrously quick FW14B was an absolutely staggering 1.9 seconds ahead of Italian team-mate Riccardo Patrese. How much of that was down to commitment? A lot. We have lost an important ingredient in the recipe for finding lap time and it is a sad loss.

That is not to say that Silverstone is an easy ride — and Hamilton had to use every ounce of talent to bring his wounded W11 home — but its demands have changed dramatically. It can still be “brutal”, as Williams’ George Russell described it after the race. And ask Daniil Kvyat, Kevin Magnussen or Alexander Albon — who all had hefty shunts this weekend. Make a mistake and you are likely to careen into the wall, not slither into it impotently. You might be uninjured, but you will be shaken. Nico Hulkenberg, too, would have felt its effects on his return to the grid after eight months out.

It is as much about endurance for the drivers’ bodies as well as for their cars and, as we saw on Sunday, their tyres. The loads that now go through these contact points are astonishing. The result of extra downforce that makes driving the high-speed turns and twists easy flat out is that the tyres now take an extreme amount of punishment over a race distance.

Odd as it was, it seemed to be a specific but not massively strange set of circumstances that threw up the spate of late tyre failures. Certainly not as strange as the legion of rear blowouts that happened in 2013, though that was largely caused by teams running low pressure, high camber and even mounting the rear tyres incorrectly.

There is a chance that the punctures this year could have been caused by debris, perhaps left by Kimi Raikkonen’s Alfa Romeo. That is what Hamilton thought.  The more likely scenario is of the tyre's construction being pushed to breaking point. Sainz and Bottas both complained about vibrations.  The failures all happened on the same tyre, in a similar manner and within a few minutes of each other at the race's climax. It seems much more likely that the stresses and strains of pounding around this track for nearly 40 laps did for them.

The Pirelli hard compound tyres should have lasted that long, according to the manufacturers. They did for the other 13 who put that compound on under the second safety car. But “lasting” for 40 laps is not the same as failing beyond that.  Why the disparity?

There are too many variables to measure, but perhaps the Mercedes is such a good car that it can run with extra downforce, allowing the driver the confidence and ability to throw it into the high-speed corners more, increasing wear. Their half-a-second pace advantage in race trim over Verstappen demonstrates this. Or, perhaps, if the race were 57 laps long it would have happened to everyone.

It raises interesting questions about this week’s 70th anniversary Grand Prix at the same track, where hotter conditions are expected. For the second Silverstone race, the tyre compound selections are a step softer — last week’s medium compound will be classified as the hard, the soft the medium and so on — and a simple one-stop race looks unlikely or risky. Tyre pressures will be raised, and teams will combat it in other ways. Will a one-stop strategy be possible? Do not rule it out, even after the chaos we saw.

Whatever the outcome, you get the feeling that the best drivers will be able to maximise their performances to suit. The podium on Sunday had three men at the top of their game, who drove vastly varying races but were utterly deserving of their place.

Hamilton almost literally drove the wheels off his car to move within four race wins of Michael Schumacher’s record 91. Verstappen week after week gets the most out of his Red Bull, in great contrast to the struggles of team-mate Alexander Albon. And Charles Leclerc took an unexpected second podium in the season for Ferrari, whilst Sebastian Vettel could only scrape home with a single point.

It was a case of F1’s present vs its future. The sport is begging for the two younger men to find race-winning cars again. But for now, Mercedes and Hamilton are unbeatable.  With a 30-point lead over Bottas, the seventh title seems like when not if. Even Silverstone exacting its revenge on a man who has dominated its curves could only slow him down — not stop him.