British Grand Prix 2012 - Round-up

First of all, allow me to apologise for the lateness of this post – my girlfriend and I were among the thousands of mud-soaked campers at this year’s British Grand Prix, where the torrential downpours had delayed our return until this afternoon as our campsite became a veritable cesspool.

On the upside, we were fortunate enough to enjoy the incredible sensory experience that is having 24 Formula One cars circulating one of the greatest motor racing tracks in the world before our very eyes. Armed with a reasonable vantage point in the grassy bank between Stowe and Vale corners and a handy-dandy ‘Fanvision’ device, we were able to keep abreast of all the action in another intriguing and rather eventful contest.

Red Bull and Ferrari emerged from the 90-minute rain-induced delay in the middle of qualifying to emerge as the most competitive teams, with Fernando Alonso on pole position from Mark Webber. Sunday was essentially a two-horse race between the top two contenders in this year’s championship, and it was a superior tyre strategy that gifted the Aussie a popular ‘home’ victory – he does, after all, live just down the road from Silverstone in a village near the town of Aylesbury.

With soft and hard tyres on the menu for what was miraculously a completely dry race, Ferrari opted to start Alonso on hard tyres and Red Bull softs for Webber, with all the Q3 men free to choose their tyre compound for the race with their qualifying times naturally having been set with intermediate tyres. It was the hard tyre that proved the quicker over a stint, Alonso duly making a good start and quickly building a gap with his faster rubber.

Alonso began his final stint, for which he had to equip soft tyres with fourteen laps to go, with a buffer of around five seconds over Webber. The Red Bull driver however began to eat into the Spaniard’s advantage at an alarming rate with the help of the hard tyres, and found himself sitting on the championship leader’s gearbox with around seven laps to go. It became clear that it would merely be a question of when, rather than if, Webber would find a way past and claim the win.

Sure enough, the move came with the help of DRS at Brooklands on lap 48, and the best efforts of Alonso were insufficient to keep his ailing Ferrari in the lead of the race as the pair went toe-to-toe around Luffield. Webber held on for the remaining laps to take his second Silverstone win in three years, with Alonso seemingly content with second place and a marginally reduced championship lead of thirteen points.

Third position fell to Sebastian Vettel, who made use of an early first stop to jump ahead of the queue that formed in the wake of Michael Schumacher in the opening stint. The reigning champion however was never a factor for the win having damaged his front wing by clipping Felipe Massa on the opening lap, and was forced to settle for the final step on the podium.  With fourth place, Massa took his best result since finishing third in the 2010 Korean Grand Prix, and was even catching Vettel towards the end of the race in an assured drive.

The Brazilian was chased home by his former teammate Kimi Raikkonen, whose scorching pace only became evident in the final stint when he set fastest lap with the benefit of clear air having previously been held up by Schumacher.  Romain Grosjean meanwhile recovered to a sixth place finish following an off in qualifying that left the Frenchman tenth on the grid and an early collision with Paul di Resta that put the Scot out of contention on lap one.

Schumacher’s wet-weather brilliance allowed him to qualify his Mercedes higher than it had any real right to be in third place, but reality bit beneath the sunshine on Sunday as the German slipped to a more representative seventh-place finish. Nico Rosberg on the other hand was ineffective all weekend, making a poor start from a mediocre grid slot of eleventh and failing to make any real progress thereafter en route to a dismal fifteenth place finish behind both Toro Rosso drivers.

Another team that was left scratching their heads over their lack of form was McLaren. Neither Lewis Hamilton nor Jenson Button qualified especially well, the former starting from eighth and the latter sixteenth following a disastrous Q1 exit. A long opening stint gave Hamilton a brief lead in front of his adoring home fans, but a strategic error by McLaren – making Hamilton run the slower soft tyre for just seven laps in the middle stint – compounded a simple lack of race pace on the part of the Woking-built cars. Hamilton finished where he started whilst Button made a good start and kept his nose clean to steal the final point of the day as a number of his other rivals hit trouble.

Chief among these was Pastor Maldonado, who got himself embroiled in yet another on-track collision. Sergio Perez was was attempting to pass the Venezuelan around the outside at Brooklands having pulled clear along the preceding straight before Maldonado outbraked himself and piled into the side of the Sauber, putting the irate Mexican out of the race. Maldonado was able to continue, but the damage he sustained limited him to a sixteenth place finish while his teammate Bruno Senna drove a decidely more steady race to ninth place between the two McLarens.

To complete a wretched weekend for the Sauber team, Kamui Kobayashi was running well inside the points until he mowed down several members of his pit-crew during his final stop in his over-exuberance. The Japanese thus could do no better than eleventh, ahead of the sole remaining Force India of Nico Hulkenberg who lost places with a late off-track excursion at Stowe as he battled Senna in the closing stages of the race.


Although the standard of the television coverage in the modern era of the sport is second to none, nothing can beat the actual experience of being there to see, hear and smell the incredible machines that are Formula One cars amid an atmosphere to rival any world-class sporting event. For all the rain, mud, lack of showering and horrifically overpriced food and merchandise, a visit to the charming and rustic Silverstone circuit is one I could recommend to any F1 fan.