7 days ago
How the home of the British Grand Prix has evolved over 75 years
From a dozen likely lads competing in the Mutton Grand Prix to the cheapest race-day tickets selling for an eye-watering £389, Silverstone has come a long way over the past eight decades.
It was September 1947 when 12 daredevils decided to have a race around the then-disused RAF Silverstone, a former pig farm on the Northamptonshire-Buckinghamshire border. They duly marked out a two-mile circuit on the former Second World War bomber base's three runways.
During the ensuing race, its instigator Maurice Geoghegan crashed into a sheep that had innocently ambled onto the impromptu circuit. The driver was uninjured but both car and sheep were write-offs – hence the Mutton Grand Prix.
From bomber base to racing circuit
By 1950, the Royal Automobile Club had leased Silverstone and decided it would be the base for Britain and the world's first-ever world championship grand prix. It laid out a new 2.9-mile track around the airfield's perimeter roads, marked with ropes, straw bales and old oil drums, the height of safety at the time.
Big teams of the day Alfa Romeo and Maserati entered that first round of the new world championship; ever the contrarian, Enzo Ferrari refused to enter his scuderia because he deemed the RAC's appearance money too stingy.
Nonetheless, the entry list did include a British former prisoner of war who had attempted a glider escape from the infamous Colditz castle, a 56-year-old Frenchman who remains the oldest driver to score points in a championship grand prix, as well as a member of the Thai royal family.
Prince Bira of Siam might have felt at home as the 200,000 spectators thronging the track on Saturday 13 May included King George VI, the only time a reigning monarch has visited the British Grand Prix on race day.
My uncle, who lived in Northamptonshire, was one of the less celebrated fans who paid 7/6 (38p, or £11.27 after inflation) to get in. At the time Silverstone had minimal banking for racegoers to spectate from and only a couple of rudimentary grandstands, so most people parked by the straw bales and some stood on their cars to watch.
An army engineer, my uncle's solution was more ingenious: he and his mates transported scaffolding poles and planks on the roofs of their cars to build their own mini grandstand.
They saw a 70-lap race that lasted two and a quarter hours and was won by Alfa's Italian star Giuseppe Farina at the relatively sedate average speed of 91mph. As a comparison, Lewis Hamilton averaged nearly 140mph to win last year's Silverstone race. If he'd done the 1950 grand prix at that speed it would have been over three quarters of an hour earlier.
Silverstone speeds up
Astonishingly, the Silverstone circuit stayed largely unchanged for the next 40 years. Gradually more grandstands were built around the track. And the ropes, straw bales and oil drums were replaced with crash barriers and earth banks. This didn't just improve the view for spectators who couldn't afford grandstand seats, it also made the experience slightly less hazardous.
Those hardy fans were still treated to an increasing spectacle on the track. Cars had changed dramatically since the 1950 race, making Silverstone fearsomely fast. Engines had been moved behind the drivers in the late 1950s and racers lay in, rather than sat on, their cars. Primitive bodywork on spindly bicycle wheels had become long, sleek and low with fat, grippy tyres.
By 1973, average lap speeds had duly escalated to 138mph so for the 1975 grand prix a chicane was added before the pit straight to slow the cars. It reduced the fastest lap speeds by a mere 4mph. But this was a time when racing drivers were men with long hair, big sideburns and a cavalier attitude to danger.
Barring tiny tweaks, the track remained unchanged until 1990 when, with aerodynamics gluing cars to the road through corners, Silverstone was the fastest track on the Formula One calendar, with drivers averaging up to 161mph per lap.
Competition drives Silverstone on
For 1991, F1 stars didn't need quite such large cojones when they set out to drive Silverstone. Modifications including additional and reprofiled corners around the circuit slowed speeds, although Nigel Mansell's moustache still averaged 131mph while winning that year's race.
But despite more changes to slow cars in 1994, 1996 and 1997, it was difficult to dissociate an increasingly shabby Silverstone from its pig farm roots. While drivers still loved the track's challenges, in the face of classier competition from Asia and the Middle East, there was talk of Silverstone losing its grand prix.
That woke up the owners and prompted a multi-million pound upgrade for 2010. This included a new arena section with three grandstands on what was once the pig fields. And rather than foot-to-the-floor, hold your breath and hope, the new 3.6-mile lap became a much more technical challenge while maintaining some of the original circuit's legendary fast sections.
For this weekend's 60th Silverstone grand prix, 75 years after that first race, drivers will be internationally recognised elite sportsmen, nearly half a million fans will flood through the gates over the weekend and rich people in helicopters will make the track Britain's busiest airport on Sunday. A bit different to the Mutton Grand Prix.
