12 Memorable Moments From The Brilliant British Grand Prix

1. New pair of pants for Lewis

The British GP didn’t get off to the best of starts. A typically British rain shower soaked the grid before lights out, causing the race to begin behind the safety car. But eventual winner Hamilton got a nasty surprise when he got caught out and almost crashed into another Mercedes!

2. Get racing!

The early laps were pretty tentative but drivers soon started complaining about the track being ready to race. The FIA have been pretty safe when it comes to starting races in the rain and this continued at Silverstone. It was a puzzling situation with the track quickly drying and the sun actually out…

Arguably the greatest battle of the race was between Nico Rosberg and Max Verstappen. The two put in some incredible overtakes during the race, including this one by Verstappen around the outside at Chapel to secure second place.

4. Something’s not quite right

Jolyon Palmer’s post-pitstop Renault appears to be missing something? A wheel wasn’t secured properly and the mistake proved pretty costly for the British driver.

5. Who’s going to pit first?

Formula 1 strategy isn’t usually a fun topic, but whenever it rains, we enter the territory of who will risk it first. At Silverstone we had that twice, for the initial change from wet to intermediates and a little later to move onto the slick tyres. Daniel Ricciardo was the first to pit for inters, while Sebastian Vettel was the first to go onto dry tyres.

With some water patches still on the track, it proved to be treacherous – the fast Turn 1 was probably the trickiest place and it caught out a lot of drivers. It felt like a driver was facing the wrong direction there almost every other lap. Kimi Raikkonen was one of them, and “bwoah” was probably his reaction…

Two drivers actually ended up hitting the wall after going off at the first corner, which is called Abbey. Fernando Alonso was the first to do so after a seriously high-speed spin but he continued, while Rio Haryanto wasn’t so lucky.

Vettel’s race wasn’t going particularly well and he ended up finding himself racing Felipe Massa for ninth place. But in the tricky conditions, he ran wide at Turn 3, got a twitch and ended up forcing both of them off track. Massa was not a happy bunny and Vettel got a five-second time penalty for the move.

9. Rosberg vs Verstappen, part two

Rosberg then claimed back P2 from Verstappen with a similar move to the one he had lost the runner-up spot to earlier in the race, this time at Stowe. Some great battling between the two of them.

Then there came that radio message. Rosberg reported a gearbox issue with just a handful of laps to go and was told to switch to “chassis default 0-1” and also to “shift through” seventh gear. This breached the team radio regulations and handed Rosberg a 10-second time penalty, dropping him behind Verstappen.

11. Hamilton wins

So Hamilton went on to claim a clear fourth Silverstone victory and fourth win of the season too, cutting the championship gap (which was then cut again due to Rosberg’s penalty and is now down to just one point). He was clearly pretty happy about the result!

12. Crowdsurfing!

So happy in fact, he went to visit the fans after the podium celebrations and did a spot of crowdsurfing! It topped off what was a pretty successful day for the three-time world champion.