Jenson Button arrives on home soil for the next leg of the season. His nearest challengers are running out of time to mount a comeback, and will be looking to give the Brit a bloody nose in his own backyard. Look ahead to the race with Patty's wordy preview.
Talking Points
- The Racing is Secondary
Try as you might to avoid bad things grabbing your attention, be it a massive pile of slowly-congealing washing up, the gradual expansion of your waistline, or those questionable texts you found on your partner's phone, eventually you just have to confront the problem and deal with it. And so, it seems, F1 will be forced to do just that at Silverstone. This weekend, the FIA/FOTA war (as it will doubtless one day be christened), looks like it may finally be creeping towards a climactic end battle the like of which you'd usually struggle to pull off without direction from Paul Jackson. The chat from both sides had grown palpably more hostile over the last few days, and whether they like it or not, this Friday will see the situation resolve itself in intelligent compromise, or a massively damaging schism of resources. Five of the FOTA teams were only given provisional entries to the 2010 championship last week, and according to the rules laid down by the FIA, if BMW Sauber, McLaren, Renault, Toyota and Brawn GP fail to drop their rule-based caveats that they all paper-clipped to their entry forms by the end of Friday's play, they will be turfed out into the cold, dark, hostile streets, forced to spend the rest of their lives destitute and begging for race contracts to use as an excuse to spunk a champagne budget totalling the average debt of a Sub-Saharan nation on impressing celebrities.
Should those five go, Ferrari, Red Bull and Toro Rosso will almost certainly follow, despite the pathetically limp effort by the governing body to argue that they already submitted unconditional entries to the sport back in around 2005, and the sporting world will be completely reshaped by hyperbolic journalism such as this sentence as the top level of motorsport splits in two. Alternatively, the teams and the FIA could just sit down, calm down and come to a compromise that is just strong enough for both to claim victory, and just weak enough to ensure another few years of happy ranting over F1's issues. Or alternatively again, the FIA could panic and come up with some sort of hackneyed excuse, conveyed in a statement that uses the words "progress" and "promising" a lot, to delay the deadline for another week or so.
Whatever the eventual outcome, and it seems unlikely that any result from Friday's zero hour will be anything approaching a definitive conclusion to this whole faff, it seems inevitable that once again, the hot action on track will be secondary to the hot air being guffed out from all sides behind the scenes.
- Farewell Silverstone
Which is a shame, because there's plenty of interest to keep you glued to the increasingly redundant "racing some cars" aspect of the sport. For one, the most prolonged and pre-conceived removal from a position since Tony Blair left office is heralded this weekend, as Silverstone hosts what should almost certainly be it's final Formula One Grand Prix (for the foreseeable future, anyway). Like a defiant but ailing relative being threatened with being moved into a nursing home, the track and it's owners have fought tooth and nail against being pensioned off by Bernie's wallet, albeit without actually doing anything controversial like actually upgrading the lamentable facilities, but though the BRDC stiff-upper-lippedly fought the good fight, the British Grand Prix will be off to Donington Park from 2010, leaving Silverstone with some motorbikes, some touring cars and a scrapbook full of tattered photos of blokes in Williams-Renaults clutching Union Jacks on their slow-down laps. The loss of Silverstone is, despite the sarcasm, a crying shame. The track itself remains a fascinating test of driver skill, with the high speeds, quick corners and need to keep momentum meaning that this is one of the few circuits on the calender where any old layman can see the effort a driver can put in to really nail a lap.
Granted, the racing hasn't been up to much just recently (save the occasional monsoon or crazy priest to shake things up), but it will be sad to see a track that, despite constantly being on the verge of being dumped for a more cosmetically enhanced model, seemed at times like it would be around forever.
- Red Bullish
After undergoing remedial hypnotherapy to blot out memories of his 637 spins during the wet race on Sunday, Mark Webber will recall Silverstone last year as being proof that this is a track Red Bull can come into their own at. His stunning qualifying lap (in the link above) that left him on the front row last year, coupled with the fact that the 2009 Red Bull car puts the overall performance of the 2008 car to a degree of shame, will be enough to give him the belief that the Red Bull fightback against the Brawn team (which we've been waiting for now for around two months) is finally primed and ready to go.
Both Webber and his team mate Sebastian Vettel have issues with their performance to sort out first though. The Aussie has struggled to deliver a really decent qualifying effort for a good few races, while Vettel has been fulfilling the Massa role from 2008 in spinning, crashing and doddering his way through the races. It is true to say, qualifying-wise, that when fuel-adjustment is added to the efforts of the pair, they are usually neck-and-neck, but Webber also needs to consider that, though his recoveries in the races have been exemplary, he's unlikely to win too many races when he keeps starting them from the fourth row. Maybe a little less fuel would go an awfully long way to securing Webber the first win that his fans have ached-in-their-special-places for since 2002.
- Bandwagon Watch
As an amusing aside to the caustic atmosphere that will pervade the venue this year, the flock of home fans diligently forking out half a months salary to sit in the drizzle watching their hero for around five seconds out of every lap will be interesting to watch. Silverstone's UK fan base has never really needed much to align itself with a driver, so long as they had the good fortune to be born on this blessed isle (even if the first chance they get, they bugger off away from this blessed isle to the nearest tax haven). But with the sudden reversal in fortune of the two favourite sons this season, which way will the fans turn? Will the few, hardy Button fans from 2007-08 have to put up with a host of fair-weather Brits jogging over to their section of the grandstand hastily unwrapping their sparkly new Brawn GP merchandise as they go, or will Hamilton's lot be made of sterner stuff, happy to take the bad times with the good? As an added unknown to the balance of power, which side will the 17 remaining DC fans, made unemployed by their hero's demise, turn to?
Track Facts
Silverstone Circuit, Northamptonshire
Number of Laps: 60
Circuit Length: 5.141 km
Race Distance: 308.355 km
Lap Record: 1:18.739 - (Michael Schumacher - 2004)
2008 Pole: Heikki Kovalainen (McLaren-Mercedes)
2008 Winner: Lewis Hamilton (McLaren-Mercedes)
Timetable
Friday 19th June
Free Practice 1: 10.00 (Local Time/BST)
Free Practice 2: 14.00 (Local Time/BST)
Saturday 20th June
Free Practice 3: 10.00 (Local Time/BST)
Qualifying: 13.00 (Local Time/BST)
Sunday 21st June
Race: 13.00 (Local Time/BST)
Race Revisited - 1998
While Michael Schumacher's bizarre victory in the 1998 British race is often used to bemoan the cheating ways of the German and the Ferrari team during his reign, it is worth pointing out that the whole situation, that of Schumacher winning the race in the pit lane serving a stop-and-go penalty for passing the Benetton of Alex Wurz, was largely an example of stewarding incompetence more than Schumacher deviousness.
Going into the closing stages behind the safety car, Schumacher was deemed to have pased Wurz on the restart, before claiming the lead a couple of laps later when former race leader Mika Hakkinen spun. Despite the obvious nature of Schumie's crime, it took the stewards an age to sort out the necessary penalty, and issued a handwritten(!) stop/go order to the team some half an hour after the incident occurred, beyond the 25 minute deadline set for such crimes to be punished.
So with the team unsure as to whether they were supposed to be stopping-and-going, or whether the punishment was now going to be 10 seconds added to Schumacher's race time (the normal penalty for an incident occurring in the last 12 laps, but not a punishment issued within that timescale), Brawn pitted Schumacher as he exited Luffield for the final time, with Schumacher crossing the finish line before he reached his pit box and taking the win.
Despite outrage from McLaren, the FIA upheld the result on account of the stewards incorrectly issuing the penalty, and instead chose to penalise the race officials in question by revoking their licenses. The annoying trend for "cars under investigation" after the halfway point of Grands Prix these days to have their investigation deferred until after the race in order for the stewards to give themselves more time to think about what they ought to do, is probably a legacy of the mess-ups from Silverstone 1998.
To see a clip of the chaotic closing stages, click here.
One Year Ago
Back in 2008, Silverstone marked a decisive performance from Lewis Hamilton, as the rain fell, his rivals tumbled by the wayside, and the McLaren man delivered one of the drives of his thusfar brief career to win the drenched race by nearly a full lap. Not even a sensationally bonkers mid-race charge from the Honda-hindered Rubens Barrichello, motoring on wet tyres while the rest of the field struggled on intermediates, could flap the resolve of the Brit, who sent a sodden and probably sozzled partizan crowd into unabashed delight. Recall the race, and count how many times Felipe Massa spun, with Patty's race review here.
On Patronise
After a couple of less-than-complete weekends of coverage here on Patronise, we'll be back to the full service for Silverstone here on Patronise F1, with full live minute-by-minute text commentary on both Friday practice sessions, all of Saturday's running as the pole position is contested, and then, naturally, the race on Sunday. Reviews, opinions and Fifth Column will follow afterwards, like minty treats next to a post-dinner espresso.
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