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F1 in Britain: Automated software to blame for crushing expectations
Sometimes races finish behind a safety car, but it’s not always satisfying.
Formula 1 returned to what is a home race for most of the teams on the grid this past weekend with the British Grand Prix. Yet again this season, we saw the fastest car not win the race, as reliability has been a problem. But racing giveth and racing taketh away, and the beneficiary of one driver’s bad luck was another driver who really needed that win. Perhaps the bigger story, though, was the unfulfilled expectation that we’d see a late-race restart after the safety car came out on lap 48 of 52. An on-screen message told commentators and viewers this would be the case, but it was displayed in error, and what had been an entertaining race ended as something of a damp squib.
Silverstone, like many of Britain’s race circuits, was a World War II airbase before being demobbed, which means it’s quite flat and can be rather windy. It’s also pretty fast even in its current layout (which was changed in 2010), with corners that are among the best places in the world to watch an F1 car change direction. There were worries that the new cars would find their hybrid power units starved of energy part-way round the track, and in qualifying, the cars were limited to recovering and deploying just 6.5 MJ across a lap, compared to the 8 MJ per lap allowed in the sprint and main race.
That energy limit in qualifying was about right—unlike at Suzuka in Japan, where we had the rather pathetic sight of cars slowing down before the fast 130R corner, drivers in qualifying looked to be at the limit through corners like Copse, Maggotts, and Becketts.
On Friday, one driver in particular stood out: Ferrari’s Lewis Hamilton. The most successful driver at Silverstone since its inception, the place named a straight after him as part of that 2010 update. It must be weird going to a track knowing they named part of it after you because you’re just that good; that honor usually comes in retirement. But Hamilton was on form, buoyed up by a massive crowd, most of whom were there to see him.
Much had been expected of a newly upgraded Ferrari engine in Austria, but a combination of altitude and heat meant we did not see it at its best. With thicker, cooler air, the gap to the Mercedes was much less, and an inspired lap from Hamilton, egged on by more than 100,000 spectators, saw him grab the sprint pole from Mercedes’ Kimi Antonelli by 11 milliseconds.
The following day, Hamilton managed to keep the young Mercedes driver at bay and held out for eight laps before the inevitable happened. But Hamilton still finished second, and less than 3 seconds back after 17 laps. That’s much less of a deficit than we’ve seen before. That afternoon saw qualifying for Sunday’s race, but this time Hamilton could only manage third on the grid. Antonelli snatched pole, but between them was Charles Leclerc, Hamilton’s teammate at Ferrari.
Leclerc has been ill at ease with his race car, and if you’re not comfortable in an F1 car, you won’t find its limit. He failed to finish in Monaco and Barcelona and finished a distant eighth in Austria, albeit after qualifying second. This past weekend looked like that trend might continue, until something finally clicked between Leclerc and his Ferrari SF-26. Both Ferraris made better starts than Antonelli with Leclerc in the lead.
Then on lap 41, something broke in the steering or suspension of Antonelli’s Mercedes, possibly after riding heavily over one of the circuit’s serrated curbs. The Italian driver made another two pit stops to try to solve the problem but to no avail. He would end the race in ninth on the road but was scored 15th after being penalized for repeatedly driving off-track in an attempt to bring his damaged car home.
Up front, Leclerc looked set to cruise to his first win in almost two years. Then, on lap 48, the active rear wing on Max Verstappen’s Red Bull malfunctioned at Stowe corner. For 2026, F1 cars use a low-downforce configuration on t