British Grand Prix

There's no place like homeThere's no place like home

2026 season

Welcome to Silverstone

With the AMR Technology Campus opposite the main gate of Silverstone Circuit, no one gets a home race quite like us.

Our home is your home. Fans will be flooding in, tents being pitched, the sea of Aston Martin Racing Green growing – we can feel your support. You're with us on our journey and you're helping to write the story. You're co-creating the culture. You're shaping the sport.

Session Times

FP1

SPR

Quali

Race

Toggle below to highlight parts of the track.

Sectors
Turns
DRS

Maggotts and Becketts. What an incredible series of corners, especially in something high downforce like a Formula One car. It still blows my mind what’s possible.

Jessica Hawkins – Driver Ambassador & Head of F1 ACADEMY

Circuit length
5.891km
Number of corners
18
Race distance
306.198km

NEED TO KNOW: BRITISH GP

The essential Silverstone travel guide with Regent Seven Seas Cruises

Mastering Silverstone Circuit

Ultimate British Grand Prix facts

Last time out

The essential Silverstone travel guide with Regent Seven Seas Cruises

While the climate in Britain isn't quite as grim as people love to make out, there is a tendency to concentrate a lot of outdoor activity into a narrow summer window, which in turn means there's plenty going on at the same time of the Grand Prix. While F1 is at Silverstone, Wimbledon and the Henley Regatta are underway. It's also the time of year for outdoor music, which could mean anything from the Marriage of Figaro at Glyndebourne to a bewildering array of festivals to suit all tastes.

Staying a little closer to Silverstone, we're just a few miles away from Stowe House and its world-famous Capability Brown gardens and landscapes, which have been attracting tourists for more than 300 years. Rather less well known until recently is Bletchley Park, now a fascinating museum but formerly the home of the Government Code and Cypher School and the world's first programmable, electronic, digital computer.

Further west is the city of Oxford. With the academic term ending, many of the colleges offer tours – but even without, the city has superb museums, grand buildings, ancient libraries and punts for hire. For those who want something quieter, there are 790 square miles of the idyllic Cotswolds beyond Oxford.

Mastering Silverstone Circuit

Everything is big at Silverstone. It's a long track, with a perimeter layout that covers an enormous acreage, and a sequence of dizzying full-throttle high-speed corners. But since the introduction of the Arena layout, with the section around Village and The Loop introducing lower-speed elements, you need a car that can cope with the low-speed because there's more time to be gained or lost in slower corners.

Mostly though, Silverstone's reputation is still about flinging a car very rapidly through high-speed corners. The run from Luffield (T7) through to Vale (T16) doesn't require the brakes, with everything taken in the higher gears with occasional feathering.

Since a recent resurfacing, the track has become almost universally smooth, with very little warp or camber… but still some problematic bumps. The smoothness encourages teams to run their cars very stiff, to cope with the fast corners and high-speed changes of direction – but the faster the car goes, the closer it gets to the surface where those bumps, particularly running into Copse, can be very destabilising.

Wind direction feeds into this too. Silverstone is on a plateau and very exposed, which made it a good location for an airfield. If it's blowing from the South, then everywhere from Copse, through the hugely fast Maggotts-Becketts-Chapel section and into Stowe has a lot more downforce, and becomes all about power delivery – but a wind from the North, and the cars will be on the very limit of grip through those sections.

Ultimate British Grand Prix facts

1 | This is the 77th FIA World Championship British Grand Prix, it is one of only two ever-present events on the World Championship calendar, the other being the Italian Grand Prix.

2 | Silverstone has hosted 59 of the previous 76 British Grands Prix, including the first F1 World Championship event, on May 13th, 1950 (a Saturday). It also hosted the 70th Anniversary Grand Prix, in 2020, when the demands of the ad-hoc Covid calendar required Silverstone to host back-to-back races.

3 | Three circuits have hosted the British Grand Prix during the World Championship era. The other two are Liverpool's Aintree Circuit, which was used in 1955, 1957, 1959, 1961-2, and Brands Hatch in Kent, which was used in even-numbered years from 1964-1986.

4 | Lewis Hamilton has the start-finish straight named in his honour. He has nine victories – the most of any driver at any single grand prix (Michael Schumacher won eight French Grands Prix at Magny-Cours). Lewis' wins came in 2008, 2014-2017, 2019-2021 and last year.

5 | Fernando has a victory here, winning the race in 2006 on his way to winning the Drivers' Championship for a second time.

6 | Fernando also started his 300th Grand Prix at this circuit… all the way back in 2018.

7 | What do Nino Farina (1950), José Froilán González (1951), Stirling Moss (1955), Tony Brooks (1957), Jo Siffert (1968), Peter Revson (1973), Johnny Herbert (1995) and Carlos Sainz (2022) have in common? All of them took their debut F1 victory at the British Grand Prix.

8 | An interesting quirk of F1 history is that Ferrari have 18 British Grand Prix victories as an entrant but only 17 as a constructor. Juan Manuel Fangio's victory in the 1956 British Grand Prix came in one of the Lancia chassis acquired by Ferrari.

9 | Much of the Silverstone circuit dates back to the hastily-converted airfield perimeter track used for the 1948 (pre-Championship) British Grand Prix. It has, however, gone through many iterations, with the current 5.891km 'Arena' version of the circuit used since 2011 (2010 used a similar track but 10m longer and with the old pit-lane between Woodcote and Copse corners).

10 | Of the 16 British Grands Prix using this Arena layout, the driver starting on pole has won six times, with only Fernando (P3), Lando Norris (P3) and Hamilton (P6) winning from off the front row.

Last time out

Roy Salvadori and Carroll Shelby had an excellent qualifying session for the 1959 British Grand Prix at Aintree, getting both DBR4s onto the front two rows. Salvadori started P2 and Shelby P6 (the grid was three cars wide) but sadly neither recorded a point. Salvadori came home P6 (only the top five scored), while Selby suffered an ignition problem and retired six laps from home. Things went downhill in 1960, with Salvadori a DNF and Maurice Trintignant qualifying P21 to come home P11 in what would be our final F1 grand prix for a while...

Salvadori's 1959 result remains our best at the British Grand Prix, but we have thankfully scored points at each race since returning to F1 in 2021. Lance bagged our first points, with eighth place in 2021, Seb was ninth in 2022 and Fernando seventh in 2023. 2024 was the first time we've managed to get both cars home in the points, with Lance seventh and Fernando eighth, having started eighth and tenth respectively, negotiating their way through a couple of tricky periods when the rain started to fall, and last year was a near carbon-copy, with Lance coming home P7 and Fernando P9 in a wet-dry-wet-dry race interrupted by Safety Car and VSCs.