Silverstone was fantastic, if a little wet.
For the trip up, left at Portsmouth 2am (so as to avoid the traffic) as it turns out we maybe left too early and arrived at about 4.30am without encountering any mass traffic. Though I wasn’t too bothered as that was only 30 minutes before gate opening time and left a mere 4 hours before the first race.
On gates opening the clearly experienced F1 fans who didn’t have stand tickets ran for their favourite spots around the track - having to sit there for the four hours until the first race - definitely the hardcore.
We had a wander around the track starting at the F1 Village then heading clockwise via our seats at Stowe C and back to the entrance, passing maybe the first race of the day on the way.
The F1 Village is unsurprisingly basically a big food and merchandise market including teams cars and various other promotional fun.
So onto the races and the weather: first up was the GP2 which wasn’t too wet and was the first loud cars. I’m not too sure who was who as I don’t really follow the GP2 much but it was a good race with some close battling and a few cars going off track or coming together near us; Next was a Porsche cup which was wetter but with surprisingly few incidents and I have even less idea of who was who.
After the drivers parade and The Red Arrows came the main event, this time the stands were full and I won’t try and do a blow-by-blow review of the race as we all know what happened and I’m not a good writer so I won’t torture anyone much longer. The rain came and went, never really being very heavy and then completely cleared to bright sunshine about 20 minutes from the end.
After the mass evacuation of the stands following the race we hung around a for an hour or so to try and let the traffic ease and then went. The traffic wasn’t too bad - about an hour from Silverstone to the M40 - then home.