Wurz of wisdom - Britain

Alexander Wurz, the Williams F1 Team test and reserve driver, as a very experienced F1 drivers talks about the circuit of Silverstone, the venue for the upcoming British Grand Prix. Though, Wurz points out that this isn't the only battle to be fought in England, as there is also the special GPDA meeting.

Alexander Wurz "Silverstone has become an ultra-quick track. Some of my colleagues say it’s now dangerous and I must admit that I see their point of view. But it’s not only some sections of Silverstone that have too little run-off area. Other tracks have the same issue, too. All I can say is that I’m glad I have good insurance and a helmet, because once you put the visor down, Silverstone is a bloody cool track.

Flat in Copse?! Well it might be this year. In qualifying some guys will be flat, or for sure almost flat in Copse. It’s now a 180mph corner with a blind entry just after the start-finish straight. Already in testing this corner was tremendously quick – the whole first section of Silverstone is now, in fact. If you have new tyres and low fuel you won’t use your brakes until Stowe corner – so Copse and the super quick left-right-left-right Maggots section are all ‘no brakes’! The lose the speed you have to by lifting/downshifting and sliding into the corners. That means you have six changes of direction within the first 20 seconds of the lap and four of these corners are more than 4 g. It’s bloody cool to throw the car into this corner section: under the high loads you can really feel how hard the equipment and material is being used. You almost can feel everything twisting a little bit under the sheer forces the driver and car go through.
Of course you need the set-up right as well as having good aerodynamics – and like all other tracks it’s always a compromise at Silverstone. In fact it’s quite a difficult track to get the correct set-up for. With the super high-speed corners as well as with the low-speed stuff in the infield, you’re never 100 percent happy with the car balance.

But back to the track. Now we’re coming up to Stowe and here we have braking for the first time – but the entry is also really speedy. You start the braking literally when you turn in – and turn-in is at about 185 mph. The speed itself is not the problem, but right now when you’re already squeezing your back end to delay your barking point a little further, you know that the brake discs are stone cold. This adds a bit of spice to this corner entry, but it gets really spicy due to the bumps on the entry. So again, 185 mph, cold brakes, a braking point after turn-in and nasty bumps… Once you somehow get your car into the corner then chronic understeer takes the fun away. Kind of funny but true, with every team and every car I suffer the same problem there – maybe it’s me? No, we can’t think like that out loud, as drivers. It’s better to complain to the engineers about understeer!

After Abbey chicane, which is third-gear entry, we have Bridge. Once this was a real corner. Now with current grip levels it’s actually easy flat. The last remaining corners on the track are always a surprise. Somehow it’s very slippery in this last sector and the car has all sorts of problems, especially the last corner. maybe from the outside it looks like the cars drive like on rails, but the last corner is so slippery that the cars slide quite a lot. And I mean a lot in F1 terms.

So, we’ve discussed all shorts of spicy corners, difficult entries and set-up problems. But we also have to consider the weather conditions at Silverstone. Many times the wind is a very influential factor to the set-up. The wind changes the balance of the car a lot and for the corners where the wind comes from – the back or side – influences your driving style as well. And maybe we’ll have grey cloud this year, which seems to sit above Silverstone every time I go testing there.

Last but not least we have another spicy situation – the GPDA meeting. I’m curious to see who has the best set-up, balance and strategies for this event…"