A lot of tears will be shed this weekend over the potential demise of Silverstone as a grand prix venue in two years’ time, but they will not be universal. To some, the old second world war bomber base has outlived its era, ruined not so much by outdated facilities as by cack-handed attempts at modernisation. A glass pyramid might not have spoiled the Louvre courtyard, but the addition of the monstrous pits and hospitality complex called The Wing six years ago symbolises Silverstone’s failure to integrate past, present and future.
This week’s activation of a break clause in the contract between Formula One and the circuit’s owners, the British Racing Drivers’ Club, appears to signal the ending of a relationship that began in 1950, with the very first round of the inaugural FIA World Drivers’ Championship. The demands on the BRDC of the 17-year contract signed in 2009, and in particular the annual 5% increase in a hosting fee that started at £11.5m a year and is currently £16.2m, could yet be renegotiated. But Liberty Media, who bought F1 from a private equity firm this year, will be reluctant to grant Silverstone a reduction that might encourage other promoters to demand similar treatment.
Located on a plateau in Northamptonshire, Silverstone never was a place of outstanding natural beauty. But its idiosyncrasies – particularly the weather, which regularly provides visitors with the challenging experience of all four seasons in a single afternoon, from heatwave to blizzard – were affectionately tolerated. And the circuit certainly has history on its side. Of the 33 drivers who have held the drivers’ title, 19 have won the British Grand Prix at Silverstone, starting with Nino Farina, the first champion, in 1950.
A year later, the Scuderia Ferrari registered the first grand prix win in its history when José Froilán González beat the hitherto all-conquering Alfa Romeos, leading Enzo Ferrari, who ran the Alfa team before the war, to murmur something about having murdered his mother. At the end of the first lap in 1973 the young and headstrong Jody Scheckter triggered an unforgettably lurid nine-car accident in front of the grandstands. The memory of Nigel Mansell selling a dummy to Nelson Piquet, his Williams team-mate, on Hangar Straight is one that the passing of 30 years has not dimmed.
But the great symbol of Silverstone’s latter-day failure is the misshapen Wing, built six years ago by the BRDC at the sole insistence of Bernie Ecclestone, who made it a condition of granting them a new deal. Ecclestone detested the BRDC, whom he regarded as blazered amateurs not attuned to the imperatives of global capitalism, and was happy to use any opportunity to diminish them. Satisfying his demands for more modern facilities cost the club £27m it did not have and had to borrow.
Far worse than the financial burden, however, was the damaging effect the new building had on the circuit as a whole. The Wing was installed at what was once the back end of the circuit, between Club and Abbey corners, meaning that Formula One abandoned the traditional pits and paddock, between Woodcote and Copse. MotoGP followed suit in that first year, but reacted quickly to the utter soullessness of the new facility and fled back to the old configuration 12 months later.
Formula One, however, could hardly follow suit, having been the reason for the folly’s existence in the first place. And it could be said that the characterless concrete desert of the new paddock suits the current F1 down to the ground. Those with any feeling for the sport detest it, looking back with fondness on the old paddock cafe, where track marshals were served an all-day full English.
Liberty Media’s leaders are talking about a British Grand Prix in east London, with Canary Wharf and the Shard as part of the scenery. And why not? When much of the world aspires to the aesthetic splendour of Dubai, what could be a more appropriate setting for a sport determined to chase profit while erasing its links to any kind of cultural history?
Such a race in London might happen, although it would be awfully expensive to arrange. Regrettably, the moment for holding a grand prix on a circuit featuring the roads through and around Hyde Park passed years ago. If the virtually silent Formula E could so antagonise the residents of Battersea a couple of years ago, then the scale, the noise and the perceived environmental effects of a Formula One race on the posher side of the river would surely be deemed unacceptable.
The idea of a Formula One season without a British Grand Prix is hard to stomach. But then a season without a French Grand Prix would once have been even less imaginable, given that the very first race to be called a grand prix was held in France in 1906. Yet next year’s French Grand Prix will be the first for 10 years. Similarly with a German Grand Prix, founded in 1929 but now reduced to the status of a biennial event.
But in any case a grand prix at Silverstone without Copse Corner as its first corner and Woodcote as its last is probably a race not worth having. Once upon a time, the sight of Michael Schumacher taking his Ferrari through Copse flat in seventh gear was almost enough to banish a sense of disillusionment with the entire sport, and even that spectacle relied for its full effect on the brain’s ability to overlay something seen in real time with images of earlier occasions in the same location, from Alberto Ascari to Ayrton Senna.
Instead, Silverstone’s grand prix circuit is now full of meaningless passion-killing twiddly bits, a process that began with the introduction of the Woodcote chicane in 1975 and includes the daft Arena complex. All you can say in the circuit’s favour is that most of the corners retain names whose origins lie in actual geographical or historical features.
Shorn of its loss-making grand prix, Silverstone could happily continue as the centre of British motor racing, the home to other events and the headquarters for enterprises connected to a sport that provides jobs for around 40,000 people while maintaining the status of British technology and engineering.
But in terms of an annual Formula One race, when you treat such a legacy as something not worth preserving properly, you deserve everything you get. The 130,000 fans who will pack the place out on Sunday, and whose enthusiasm has miraculously survived no end of passive abuse, are the ones who have always deserved better.