How new hybrid engines will perform at Silverstone, regulations, high-speed corners, Lego race sparks pay dispute, Lewis Hamilton

It’s coming home, but not as you know it.

Silverstone Circuit, host of the first world championship grand prix in the inaugural 1950 season, is renowned for its high-speed driving challenge. Open and flowing and flat-out for around 75 per cent of its 5.891-kilometre distance, in its modern history it’s been one of the great demonstrations of the awesome performance of a Formula 1 car.

Even accounting for the healthy levels of exaggerated greatness from the sport’s dominant British contingent, there’s no doubting the prestige of this event.

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This year, however, will be different.

In the build-up to the weekend, the drivers’ group chat has been lighting up with dread over what famous Silverstone will be like to drive with this year’s controversial power units.

“I think this is going to be the most unprecedented weekend in terms of the power deployment,” nine-time Silverstone winner Lewis Hamilton said. “All us drivers have been talking on the drivers’ chat just [about] how poor the power is going to be through this track.

“We run out of battery power. There’s only a few corners to charge the engine, so the K [hybrid motor] will be switched off for a large portion of the lap.”

The traditional driving challenge of Silverstone is what will make it such a tough weekend for the power units.

Despite so much of the lap being taken at full throttle, it features very few braking zones, and most of them are very low energy.

There are just four braking events generating more than 2g, only one of which is considered a heavy braking event, generating more than 4g.

With so little time on the brakes, the power unit has almost no time to charge the battery.

It means drivers will be incentivised to lift off the throttle to replenish the battery — that is, go slower through the high-speed corners, like Maggotts-Becketts-Chapel — to go faster down the straights — and will at other times simply be driving with only around half the car’s maximum power.

“If you look at the speed traces, we start losing deployment going into Copse,” Hamilton said.

“Normally engine’s screaming as you go into Copse and you’re holding on for dear life as you go through there flat-out. This year the engine will be coasting down, most likely.

“We’ll be downshifting from eighth to seventh whilst full throttle, trying to keep the engine revs higher, and it’ll be a long, long straight from 9 to 10 [Copse to Maggotts] with no deployment, basically.

“Then Maggots and Becketts is just not going to feel the same, because I think you have to lift and coast or something through there for a period of time.

“It’s just a completely different track.”

Fernando Alonso, contemplating his future in part because of his dislike for the rules, said the spectacle would be “not fun” and “quite sad”.

BUT WHAT ABOUT THE RACING?

It’s somehow fitting that the original world championship grand prix could deliver a race that strikes at the heart of the problems with this year’s engines.

The drivers are almost universally pessimistic about the challenge of a qualifying lap of Silverstone with these power units.

Only George Russell dissented.

“I think Silverstone will be great,” he said, per The Race.

Though he admitted that “for sure a single lap [in] qualifying is not going to be as fast as we’ve seen it” in previous years, he said the racing action would be better.

“The tracks that are most challenging for the energy, such as Melbourne, China, they have so far produced better racing than we’ve seen in the past at those tracks,” he contended.

“There’s no doubt that tracks that are energy starved, their racing will be better, and it will be a bit more chaotic, so you could look at that as the positive.”

Lando Norris, who returns to Silverstone as both the reigning winner and defending champion, wasn’t as dismissive of the negatives, though he agreed that “on the outside I think [the racing] will be great”.

“It’ll still be quick,” he said. “I think it’ll still be good to watch. I think the most important thing is Sunday will still be exciting from a spectator point of view.

“Inside the car it might not feel exactly the same and exactly as we want as drivers … but that’s just reality of what we have nowadays.

“They’ve still tried to make some improvements to make it better even into this weekend lately, so it will still be good. It’s still Silverstone. We’re still in Formula 1. At the end of the day, we can’t complain too much.”

Formula 1 has agreed to staged changes to its engine over the next two seasons, which followed tweaks earlier this year to sand down some of the rougher edges of deployment and charging.

But the sport has been eager to solve the qualifying challenge only enough to keep the drivers happy without affecting the sort of chaotic battery-sensitive racing that’s enlivened some circuits that have traditionally featured little overtaking.

After several rounds at tracks that have struck a reasonable balance between the extremes of this contentious engine to minimise the rules as a talking point, the British Grand Prix promises to reignite the debate as one of the worst venues for the heavily hybridised motor.

That begs one final question worth pondering this weekend: what kind of Formula 1 is it when the cars don’t like the original Formula 1 circuit?

CAN RUSSELL TAKE THE ASCENDANCY, OR WILL ANTONELLI HIT BACK?

Russell has good reason to be upbeat arriving at his home race. He’s taken 28 points out of his teammate over the last two grands prix, including with a confident victory last week in Austria, to reduce his championship deficit to 40 points.

It’s still a mountain to climb, but his mission looks far more achievable than when the points gap was nudging three clear race wins.

“My performance wasn’t perfect, wasn’t great, but it was substantially better than if that race was three or four races before,” he said, reflecting on last weekend’s victory. “I’m really pleased with the progress I’ve made with my team to get the car set-up in a better place.

“I’ve got 100 per cent confidence in myself, but I’m still gaining confidence of how to get the car in the sweet spot.”

Russell is too self-aware to get too far ahead of himself after just his second win of the season and his first since Melbourne in March.

Though Russell was never really challenged for the lead in Austria, Antonelli was clearly the quicker driver in the race but lacked the polish to make the most of it.

A messy first stint followed on from his qualifying mistake abandoning his lap under yellow flags. Spielberg appeared to demonstrate the gap in experience between him and his teammate rather than a swing in speed.

The Italian teenager described himself as having “relaxed a bit too much” or being “too confident” after looking so quick during practice, which he said cost him rhythm for the rest of the weekend.

Speaking ahead of Silverstone, he said he’s using the Austria weekend as motivation to reassert himself over Russell at the Briton’s home race.

“I have a big fire inside me, because I think the last two races obviously didn’t go well, considering the pace we had,” he said, per the F1 website.

“I’m definitely looking forward to this weekend to put things more together and maximise better the result.”

Antonelli hasn’t driven badly in recent weeks. In Barcelona he was set to finish ahead of Russell before his engine failed, and in Austria it was a fine-margins defeat.

But the points swing is its own story and his first case of adversity since taking the championship lead. The expectation has been that his inexperience will be his biggest liability. Defeating his teammate at home would go some way to answering that question.

WILL THERE BE ANY CHALLENGERS TO MERCEDES?

Predicting who will be in a position to challenge Mercedes from race to race has been practically impossible this season.

The German marque has had to work for many of its wins, even as it continues its unbroken qualifying run, but the team it’s having to beat is changing round to round.

In Japan and Miami it had to beat McLaren. In Barcelona it tried and failed to beat Ferrari. Last week Red Bull Racing was probably one undercut away from propelling Max Verstappen to victory.

Hamilton is best placed on the championship table, sitting third, but he’s 46 points adrift, and after anonymous race in Austria, you can’t exactly say he or Ferrari has momentum despite winning just two races ago.

“It’s not that I’m not confident; it’s that the fact is we’ve got long straights,” he said, talking down his chances this weekend. “That’s where we will struggle probably the most. The deficit could be twice as big [as last week].”

McLaren, sharing Mercedes’s engine but not the quality of its chassis, also isn’t optimistic that it can contend for anything more than podiums, though Oscar Piastri wasn’t willing to make any predictions.

“It’s difficult to know,” he said.

“Austria was a little bit hard to read for us. Qualifying we thought we’d be a bit stronger, in the race maybe we thought we’d be a bit worse. Ferrari we thought would be quite a lot stronger on Sunday than they were. Red Bull, or Max, was a lot quicker than we thought he would be.

“It’s changing a lot at the moment from track to track with upgrades for everybody. Difficult to read, but we should be somewhere at the front — where, exactly, I don’t know, but we’re still missing that final step to really challenge for wins.

“As long as we put our best foot forward, I think we’re in the running hopefully for podiums, but we’ll have to find out.”

Verstappen, the only non-Mercedes driver who could claim to be in the ascendancy, was also unwilling to say where he could be in the pecking order.

“We just keep focusing on our own package and try to optimise that further and see if we can have more results like [Austria],” he said.

“It depends a lot on the track but also updates from other teams,” he said. “Some layouts will naturally work a bit better for us — or worse — so let’s see this weekend. Everything is still such a learning process for us that I don’t really know where we will be.

“In the race in Austria we had a chance, but I don’t know. It just changes every weekend.”

A remarkable lack of confidence, then, from every would-be contender.

The additional twist to all of this is that Silverstone is the fourth sprint weekend of the season, meaning just one practice session to adjust to Silverstone’s demands, including on the power unit.

So far this season, Russell has two sprint victories and Norris one. Verstappen is the most successful sprint driver, however, with 13 wins since the format’s introduction.

PRE-RACE LEGO LAP EMBROILED IN PAY DISPUTE

Formula 1’s sponsorship deal with Danish toy giant Lego will step up a gear this weekend with the return of its (in)famous mini cars, which the drivers will drive around the circuit before the race instead of their usual driver parade on the back of a flat-bed truck.

The Lego race made its debut at last year’s Miami Grand Prix, where 10 cars were built, complete with electric motors, to look like each team’s real F1 machine. Teammates shared each car, and though the race was supposed to be informal, it didn’t take long for the drivers’ competitive instincts to take over in a bizarre 20-minute spectacle that featured plentiful brick-sized debris.

The pre-race event returns in Great Britain, but this time all 22 drivers will have their own cars.

The mini machines, which weigh 280 kilograms each, 65 kilos of which are Lego bricks, are faster than their predecessors, with a top speed of just under 30 kilometres per hour.

The increase in speed had required an increase in safety.

“We’ve taken measures to make the go-karts as safe as possible,” Lego senior designer Jonathan Jurion old ESPN. “We’ve added some safety features like the roll-hoop, some fenders and bumpers around so that we don’t lose as many bricks as we lost last time and also to make the drivers as safe as possible.”

Not everyone is convinced about the event, however.

“It’s the most dangerous part of the weekend,” Hamilton said.

“I don’t know whether or not I’ll be in the Lego car this year.”

Pressed on that comment, he said it was “something I need to take offline”.

Ferrari has since confirmed Hamilton will take part, but there’s reportedly more than just safety concerns behind his reluctance.

According to the London Telegraph, Hamilton and other drivers are involved in a dispute over the increasing amount of promotional and marketing activity they undertake without additional pay.

The paper further reports that Hamilton is not the only driver to have kicked up a fuss despite being the only one to threaten not to participate.

Most other drivers were publicly enthusiastic about the race, though Max Verstappen had reservations.

“We are Formula 1 drivers; we should not look like kids and clowns trying to ram into each other,” he said. “I don’t think that’s what Formula 1 needs.”

Clowns or not, the pre-race driver parade has suddenly become must-watch television.