Toto Talks Great Britain
We’re pleased to get back racing after a bruising weekend in Austria. We scored a handful of points, but we didn’t have the pace for much more. The field behind Red Bull is incredibly close and also fluctuating each weekend. Some of this is circuit-specific, and some the upgrade cycle across the grid. We fell on the wrong side of this equation in Spielberg, but we’ve got a chance to bounce back immediately.
The Team has been hard at work to analyse and draw learnings from our performance. We have taken the result on the chin and will aim to recapture the momentum we had built up across previous races. With the next upgrades and experiments coming in Silverstone, there are reasons for optimism. Nevertheless, we are not getting ahead of ourselves. We’re focused on the job at hand, extracting performance from the car, and will see where we stand this weekend.
The British Grand Prix is one of the highlights of the season. The atmosphere at Silverstone is unique and the support from the fans is truly incredible. It’s also our local race, with the track just down the road from the factories in Brackley and Brixworth. It’s a fast and flowing layout which creates great racing, so hopefully we can perform well and put on a good show.
Fact File: British Grand Prix
At 5.891km, Silverstone is the fifth-longest circuit on the 2023 calendar. It was previously the fourth-longest, but the introduction of Las Vegas (6.120km) has demoted it down a place.
Silverstone’s legendary layout is tough on tyres, especially the left-front which has huge loads imposed on it through Turns 1, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 and 15.
Given its high-speed nature with fast, flowing corners, brakes are not put under a great strain at Silverstone. Teams therefore can focus on other areas such as fine-tuning aerodynamic set-up rather than on brake cooling.
As an open, exposed, former airfield, the circuit is notoriously windy and changes in wind direction happen frequently. That can have a major impact on vehicle balance and change the car’s behaviour. This forces drivers to adjust accordingly in terms of braking points, entry speeds as they approach the apex of turns, and acceleration as they exit.
From the start, drivers will complete two corners before hitting the brakes for the first time at Village (Turn 3). The distance from pole position to this point is 644 metres but, on full fuel tanks at the beginning of the Grand Prix, they do have to lift off the throttle after 225 metres.
The only race where we see a longer distance from pole position to first braking zone is at the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez in Mexico. The vast start/finish straight there sees drivers hit the brakes for the first time 811 metres from pole position.
Silverstone also has the second longest pit lane length of the season at 509 metres – the pit lane entry begins after Turn 15, with the pit exit feeding in at Turn 2.
This means that whilst time in the pit lane clocks in at 23 seconds, the third highest of the season, time loss is limited with drivers not having to negotiate Turns 16, 17, 18, and 1.
The long straights and flat-out sections around the circuit mean that 78% of the lap is taken at full throttle, the fifth highest total of the season.
Silverstone boasts some of the most iconic corner names in the whole of motorsport. It is one of only three tracks on the calendar where engineers discuss corners through their names and not numbers; the other two being Spa-Francorchamps and Monaco.
Drivers experience some of the highest lateral g-forces of the season at the British Grand Prix, with an expected maximum of 5g at Turn 11 through the Maggotts-Becketts sequence.
Silverstone is something of a home race for the team. The Brackley factory is a mere nine miles away and the home of Mercedes AMG High Performance Powertrains at Brixworth is just over 20 miles from the track.
