Formula One – British Grand Prix
The F1 circus heads to a revamped Silverstone circuit this weekend for a race that, as is traditional, will mark the halfway point of the 2010 season.
Last season Jenson Button arrived at the Northamptonshire track with a 26-point lead over his Brawn GP team-mate Rubens Barrichello – a yawning chasm under the old 10-points-for-a-win system.
But this time around 29 points is enough to cover the first five drivers in the championship, with 2008 Silverstone winner Lewis Hamilton currently setting the pace at the top of the table.
Hamilton’s McLaren team, who were scrapping at the back in last year’s race, are due to introduce a significant upgrade package for the rear of their car for this race, with suggestions abound that it could be worth up to half a second per lap.
A leap of that margin will certainly be sufficient to leapfrog the Red Bull as the fastest car in the field but their managing director Jonathan Neale has been keen to keep his expectations in check ahead of its introduction.
“I’m confident that we’ve got a reasonable performance step,” he said.
“Do I think we’ve got everything that we expected? Hard to tell at this stage, I’ll wait to see what the race drivers think. So Friday will be a testing day for us.”
With Red Bull improving at every race it’s far from certain that McLaren’s version of the RB6′s “blown diffuser” concept will be enough for the team to set the pace at a track where the Milton Keynes squad dominated last year.
Sebastian Vettel won that race comfortably from his team-mate Mark Webber and is a deserved favourite to repeat that success this time round given the speed Red Bull have shown to date.
Admittedly last month’s European Grand Prix could have turned out differently if Hamilton had not been handed a drive-through penalty for overtaking the safety car but Vettel would still have probably had enough margin to hold off the Englishman regardless.
And at a track which could have been designed specifically to show off the strengths of the Adrian Newey-designed Red Bull, we can expect to see Vettel or Webber at the front of the grid for the ninth time in 10 races.
The odds of 4/6 on a Red Bull taking another pole position look perfectly fair but dutching Vettel and Webber at industry-best prices gives us odds of a shade under 4/5.
The track has produced seven different winners in the last seven years but Vettel has a great chance of making himself odds-on to break that sequence by heading the grid at 7/4, while Webber has already taken four poles this season and simply looks too long at 4/1 to make it five.
Ferrari will also be in contention but the team were disappointed with their own blown diffuser package in Valencia – the modifications worked but McLaren and Red Bull also made crucial improvements and Fernando Alonso was left a frustrated eighth at the flag after losing out with the introduction of the safety car.
The F10 may be well-suited to the sweeping turns of Silverstone but the evidence points to it being a couple of tenths off the pace of the front two.
One team which may be able to compete with the Scuderia for the ‘best of the rest’ tag is the improving Williams squad.
Both their drivers qualified in the top nine in Valencia and Rubens Barrichello went on to finish a terrific fourth.
The car has come on leaps and bounds after a trying start to the season and the veteran Brazilian is just the man to drag the best from the FW32.
Barrichello always goes well at Silverstone – he’s finished on the podium in each of the last two years – so he looks overpriced at Blue Square’s 6/1 to take another top six finish.
Of the rest, perhaps Sebastian Buemi may also be worth keeping an eye on in the improving Toro Rosso.
We were keen on the Swiss driver earlier on in the season but had little luck when siding with him in the first few races.
But since then he has notched seven points in his last four outings and looked much more at ease with his machinery.
The neat STR5 still has plenty of Red Bull DNA in its chassis and so should go well round Silverstone.
He looks a little underrated to continue in his recent vein of form so we’ll risk jinxing him again and suggest a small bet on a points finish at Ladbrokes’ 10/3.