1) The first race, 1950
Where better to start any story than at the very beginning. Sixty long years ago, the Formula One World Championship was brought kicking and screaming into the world with a 70 lap jolly around the barely modified track, which consisted of little more than a pair of airport runways connected by a couple of perimeter roads. This was the birth of Formula One, and it was also, presumably, the birth of the "It's not domination!" war cry, as a crowd that included King George VI watched the hyper-intensively prepared four-car Alfa Romeo team dominate the event, against a motley collection of pre-war Maseratis and ERAs. The four works Alfas of Giuseppe Farina, Juan Manuel Fangio, Luigi Fagioli and Reg Parnell locked out the top four in qualifying and took a clean sweep of the podium placings. The only thing preventing a perfect result was the retirement of Fangio's car after an oil leak. Domination, then, of a level that Red Bull managed in Silverstone's swansong.
Watch some footage of the birth of Grand Prix racing here.
2) Jody piles in, 1973
Before the cataclysmic start to the 1998 Belgian race, the 1973 Silverstone event was probably the definitive first lap pile-up in F1's history, with nine of the 29 starters eliminated at Woodcote on the opening lap. The fault lay with Jody Scheckter, who at the time was a somewhat hot-headed young charger a million miles removed from the man who would beat his hot-headed young charger of a team mate to the world championship some six years hence. The South African was pushing too fast as he tried to scythe through the field, and he speared across the track, taking the cars of Roger Williamson, Graham Hill, Jochen Mass, Carlos Pace, Mike Hailwood, George Follmer, Jean-Pierre Beltoise and Andrea de Adamich with him. That number included all three Surtees cars, and the team would suffer the ignominy of watching the restart without a single car on the grid. Though the injuries suffered were relatively small given the build of the cars back in the day, de Adamich did suffer enough of a knock to eventually force him to retire from the sport a year later.
In the race itself, the American driver Peter Revson took his first grand prix victory, ahead of Ronnie Peterson, Denny Hulme and James Hunt.
3) Mansellmania, 1992
Some sporting heroes defy explanation. Tim Henman kept Wimbledon's Pimms-quaffing crowd in rapt attention, Argentian's football fanatics have followed Diego Maradona through all manner of drug problems, and Australia still worships Ricky Ponting, despite the fact that he's a complete arse. And then there was the way that a mumbling, dour, moustachioed Brummie so enraptured a nation in the late 1980s and early 1990s, in what, to look at it now, is perhaps the definition of a "be there" moment. It seems bizarre now to see the fans break ranks to rush the circuit and mob "Our Nige" after he took the checkered flag, but somehow, at the time, this least likely of characters elicited an almost (whisper it) Tifosi-esque response from his fan base. Although there tended to be a Silverstone invasion whenever the 'tached one had a good run at his home event, even in 1991 when Ayrton Senna had to fend off the massing crowd as he hitched a ride on the sidepod of Mansell's Williams, the 1992 race was probably the most memorable, as it represented something of a catharsis for the weary Brits. After watching their man try and fail to attain that elusive championship for so many years, they realised that in a car that was several levels above anything else on the grid, this was finally going to be his year, and, like a bout of tantric frottage, it was the extra time spent getting to it that made the fan's joyous release so much more special.
4) Schumie left Flagging, 1994
Although the 1994 season is remembered most (apart from the awful San Marino weekend) for the climactic title decider which ended in circumstances that would have broken internet message boards by the dozen, had the internet existed outside Tim Bernars Lee's garage back then. But Michael Schumacher can really blame the furore over his decisive move on another contretemps he got involved in back at Silverstone. The Benetton man overtook polesitter Damon Hill on the formation lap, got a stop and go penalty for it, which he promptly failed to serve. This then led to a black flag, which he seemed to ignore, and in the end Schumacher was disqualified from the race and handed a further two race ban for his troubles. Hill made hay while Schumacher seethed on the sidelines, winning the British GP and the two that Schumacher missed as part of his ban, which meant he was back in the hunt and was in a position take the title race down to the wire. Had Schumacher obeyed the rules at Silverstone, there would have been no need to bend them in Adelaide.
Then again, the actual reasons for Schumacher's actions that day remain somewhat elusive. Even years after the event, Schumacher still protests his innocence, saying that "I didn't ignore the black flag...and I couldn't understand why I of all people should have been the scapegoat." Thankfully, Schumacher got used to that role in the future.
5) The Mudbath, 2000
Attending a Grand Prix in today's corporate age is supposed to be more luxury holiday than sweaty festival, with the state-of-the-art conditions at the new breed of Tilkedromes treating fans to relative comfort, speedy access and workable facilities. But in Britain, we don't do things like that. Never was that more obvious than in 2000, when a dubious decision by the powers that be to move the race to late April saw the fans and the drivers given an exercise in just how awful the English weather can be when you move outside the comfort zone of the token couple of weeks of sunshine in the summer. Spectators saw their cars swallowed up by the sodden fields that had turned into swamps around the track, forcing organisers to beg fans not to travel in by car on Saturday morning as the groaning access roads to the track came to a halt, and the whole thing had an element of farce about it: the second Friday practice session was red flagged after a Land Rover sent to recover David Coulthard's broken McLaren from the side of the track got stuck in the mud, and then Sunday's warm-up was delayed when heavy fog prevented the medical helicopter from taking off.
Nevertheless, though talking heads complained on the news, Bernie wagged his finger at the organisers, saying that the BRDC were "doing what they normally do and not taking the weather into consideration," (while cannily refusing to accept any blame for moving the race in the first place), the fans just got on with it. It'll take more than a bit of rain to get us Brits down, otherwise we'd have all committed suicide en masse years ago. In the end, the packed grandstands got their reward on Sunday when David Coulthard scored a memorable victory in front of his home fans.
6) Madman stops play, 2003
Ah, the modern world, eh? Just 11 years on from the mass track invasions of the Mansell era, F1 wouldn't even let one single man onto the circuit for a bit of a jolly. To go all Daily Mail for a moment: "Uuuurgh, it's that elf n safety thing gone maaaaad". But then again, there was the slight issue of the race not actually being over when Neil Horan, the priest in the kilt, decided to go for a wander down the Hangar Straight. Happily, given the potential for a far less TV-friendly outcome to the moment of madness, we go to watch the crazy fool rugby tackled by a number of burly track marshals, as opposed to seeing him getting collected by one of the defenceless cars heading towards him. When being charged with aggravated trespass, Horan claimed that, in a similar defence used by hundreds of drunken streakers at cricket games across the world, he hadn't planned to perform the protest when he had arrived, which was an argument only slightly let down by the fact that he arrived at the track with the ready-made placard and a change of clothes. Incidentally, Horan's self-made placards had the message: "The Bible is always right" scrawled across them. Presumably he was referring in particular to the line "Forgive us our trespasses".
Undeterred by the two months in prison he served for the Silverstone stunt, Horan made a return to the limelight when he ran from the crowd and pushed over the runaway leader in the men's marathon in the 2004 Olympics, losing the athlete the gold medal in the process. He also, somewhat improbably, auditioned for the 2009 series of Britain's Got Talent. What an odd man.
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