We tried beating last year's Silverstone pole time in F1 25… by driving it backwards

Top Gear

2 days ago

Gaming
Who knew Northamptonshire was this lumpy? Skip 8 photos in the image carousel and continue reading
Last year, George Russell put his Mercedes on pole for the British Grand Prix by driving a surgically precise 1m25.819s around Silverstone. Like all of Russell's career pole laps to date, there was an element of underdog victory to it, a triumph of talent and performance under pressure against the odds. The odds being, of course, quicker McLaren, Red Bull, and Ferrari packages, depending on the season.
Let it be noted, however, that Russell elected to drive his pole lap around Silverstone by going the correct way around the track. We've gone back and checked – they all did.
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One of F1 25's unsung new features is reverse layouts. Silverstone is one of three circuits that can now be raced in the opposite direction, along with Zandvoort and the Red Bull Ring, and after all the time we've spent lapping it in the usual, status quo, boring way, the chance to take on the layout in reverse got us thinking: can we beat Russell's lap if we race in reverse?
With that hare-brained notion filling our minds and the mental image of waving to adoring stands full of patriotic fans on a cool-down lap making our chests puff out with pride, we head to the track. And the first thing we have to contend with is that, goodness, this feels so wrong . You might like
It was bad enough when they changed where the start-finish line was a few years ago, but this is another level of disorienting. The reality of driving such an historic circuit backwards, the place where Formula One began and where every aspiring British F1 driver logs untold virtual hours of videogame hotlaps, feels like burning along the wrong way down the M25. Forget sector times, our eyes keep getting drawn to the mirrors to see if the police are about to pull us over.
It takes ten laps just to shake that feeling, and to draw the roughest of mental sketches of the brake markers and turn-in points. So far we are, it should go without saying, quite a lot slower than when driving Silverstone clockwise.
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Then comes the next mental adjustment to contend with: the elevation. Silverstone isn't exactly famed for its dramatic topography, but driving that familiar space anti-clockwise seems to reveal much more elevation change than you perceive when driving it clockwise.
After navigating those slow, twitchy curves around Club and Vale, it's uphill – notably uphill – up to Stowe, which can be taken even closer to flat-out since we're not carrying as much speed. The elevation doesn't level out along the Hangar straight, either.
We're still gaining altitude as we head into Chapel-Becketts-Maggotts, a trio of corners that form a kind of racing tongue-twister when approached in reverse. Anyone who's hot-lapped Silverstone plenty knows to gradually scrub off the speed through each of these corners since they get sequentially tighter. When taking them in reverse and going uphill, of course, it's the complete opposite.
Now it's about carrying maximum speed through Chapel and into Becketts, scrubbing off just a tiny bit of speed in order to make the apex and line up a flat-out exit through Maggotts, where your corner exit speed is compounded all the way round to Luffield.
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Which leads onto mental hurdle number three: Silverstone in reverse might be the most technical track in existence. After 30 laps, roughly 12 of which have actually remained within track limits, we're still miles off the pace, and it's because this reverse layout seems to bring out an even more pronounced version of Silverstone's defining challenge - precise turn-in points at high-speed corners.
So many of its corners are taken with either just a momentary tap of the brakes or a single downshift. You have to be incredibly confident, committed and precise about your turn-in point at those speeds, because the trajectory of your corner exit can vary massively. That's one reason we're not getting near our usual Silverstone hotlap times.
Russell would probably be looking pretty smug by now if he could see our efforts. The combination of going uphill instead of down on the straights and lacking the precision on high-speed turn-in is hurting our lap times, and there's not even much we can do about it in the setup menu. The demands on the car are similar to the clockwise layout, only… more. We turn down the downforce a bit, and find a couple of tenths after another five laps.
We're hours in now. The fruits of our labour? A *cough* 1m28s. Just the three seconds shy of Mr Spreadsheet's lap from last year. We're blaming the hills. A glance at the global leaderboard time reveals that nobody else has beaten the 2024 pole time in reverse either – at the time of writing, the fastest is a 1.25.9 – so maybe there's something to our theory after all.