Book of the Month: Silverstone – The Home of British Motor Racing

We take it for granted, still curse the traffic on British Grand Prix weekends and brace ourselves for that chill wind that whips across the old airfield site nearly every time we visit. And yet you’ve got to love Silverstone. After all, it’s home.

Our comforting familiarity with the place, despite all the developments in recent years, is reflected in this second edition of Chas Parker’s paean to Britain’s premier race circuit. It was first published 12 years ago, so an update is well timed in this 75th anniversary year of the F1 drivers’ world championship – which, of course, started here. As Parker writes in his introduction, back in 2013 Alain Prost had won more grands prix at Silverstone than anyone else, with five. In comparison, Lewis Hamilton had only a single home win to his name, from 2008. Now he has a record-smashing nine.

An awful lot can happen in a dozen years and that’s reflected in the 64 extra pages that bring the Silverstone story up to date. As before, the book works chronologically, beginning with the circuit’s foundation on the site of an RAF airfield in 1948. A map of the area dated 1943 clearly shows the familiar outline made by the perimeter road around criss-crossing runways. Essays on each decade then follow, with bullet-point spreads on the key races in each year – not just F1, everything else too. Much of the book functions as a useful dip-in reference guide to the circuit’s race history.

The most recent decades are dominated by the interminable saga of securing the British GP. It’s dry stuff at times, although as Parker points out, the politicking and tiresome internal squabbles within the British Racing Drivers’ Club all lead to the relative calm that has fallen over the rapidly evolving Silverstone we know today. Bernie Ecclestone doesn’t come out of it too well, although much of his brutal criticism was actually justified. At least a couple of chapters end with the paraphrased summary: a decade of turmoil, followed by the security of a new British GP deal. The latest is for 10 years.

There’s some labyrinthine tales of the businesses I’d forgotten: how close JLR came to making Silverstone its own test track, for example. Then there’s the first-hand insights. Circuit chief Stuart Pringle recalls watching the behind-closed-doors Covid GP of 2020 in the BRDC President’s Suite. Left cold by the spectacle playing out to empty grandstands, he ended up turning to unanswered emails before the race was done.

Circuit commentator David Addison offers an incisive perspective too. “When it’s dressed for a big occasion, when it’s got all its regalia on, it looks fantastic,” he says, but “you can see where the joins are” at low-profile clubbies. True – and not necessarily a bad thing. The old tarnish is key to Silverstone’s character.

Packed with detail, with panels from the drivers and riders who made our memories plus a great range of 300 photos, this is the book dear old Silverstone deserves.

Silverstone: The Home of British Motor Racing
Chas Parker
Evro Publishing, £60
ISBN 9781910505922