Opinion: Alex Kalinauckas

After much uncertainty, the return of the British Grand Prix with a full-capacity crowd is a welcome sign of better times to come

“The British GP is paid for by fans’ tickets, so without them it would’ve been very difficult”

The COVID-19 pandemic has stolen so much – and things so much more important than normal sporting fixtures. Because of our current global nightmare and the resulting social restrictions, the 2020 British Grand Prix and the following

70th Anniversary race were held behind closed doors.

So many crave a return to the way we lived before the pandemic. And, in one small way in the grand scheme of things, a piece of normality is coming back this weekend: the 2021 British GP will be a full-capacity event, with fans back in attendance. This weekend’s event should be fizzing with humanity once again, nearly a year on from a pair of races that felt like bizarre mid-season tests. They were accompanied by thoughts and hopes for the next campaign and things being different – indeed, back to the way they are supposed to be. But, for the British GP at least, that was far from guaranteed, thanks again to the challenges posed by the pandemic.

The 2021 F1 calendar was revealed last November, and it looked largely as would be expected had life continued from 2019. It has had to change a fair bit since then as F1, the FIA and many other racing stakeholders work flexibly to ensure the show continues. But at the time, with the first COVID vaccines being deployed and the promise of normal life returning as a wonderful result, there was reason to hope that many of 2020’s economic dangers had passed for motorsport entities such as Silverstone.

But as we know now, the process of unlocking societies is gradual and remains fraught with peril. In the UK, sport had been able to continue within a set of strict exemptions because the government recognised its morale-boosting nature and economic value. But stadiums won’t be allowed to reach full capacity again until 19 July, when remaining legal limits on numbers are removed.

That is one day after the 2021 British GP will take place. Of course, the final stage in the UK’S unlocking was supposed to occur a month earlier, before being delayed by the surge in coronavirus cases fuelled by the Delta variant. But such events take months of planning and arranging anyway, and in Silverstone’s case fans just had to be back – and back in large numbers.

“You don’t need to be the biggest student of Formula 1 to know that the British GP is essentially paid for by the fans and their tickets,”explains Silverstone boss Stuart Pringle.“so, if they could not be there, or they could not be there in the numbers necessary, then our ability to pay the fee [to F1 as part of Silverstone’s racehosting contract] would have been extremely heavily compromised. And that would’ve been very difficult for Silverstone to deal with.”

Pringle has had “a lot” of meetings with the UK government’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport department, as Silverstone worked to understand how it could balance the remaining restrictions with its contractual obligations with F1. The result was this weekend’s British GP gaining a place on the government’s gradually expanding Event Research Programme.

It is understood that initial talks about allowing fans back to the British GP initially involved far lower numbers, in the region of 25% capacity. This would have been a major problem for Silverstone because its margins on the F1 contract are fine. In the end, it got its wish as the UK government – apparently taking into account the importance of motorsport to the country’s economy – added Silverstone to the ERP and allowed a full-capacity event.

There is another political element at work too, which could be detected throughout the month just gone at Euro 2020. The UK government is keen to hold the traditional‘great British Sporting Summer’as normally as possible in 2021 to tout the success of its vaccination programme – especially in comparison to some of its European neighbours against the backdrop of Brexit.

That is‘soft power’at work, which is another reminder that the argument for sport and politics never mixing is always incorrect – they are indelibly linked. But there remains the element of sport’s power to help and heal – just look at what the England men’s football team achieved in Euro 2020, even as their quest for glory fell agonisingly short. The result of it all, for F1 fans, is that this weekend’s race will hopefully signal the longed-for return to normality. The pandemic is not over and there is likely to be more pain to come, but it will end one day.

For Silverstone, despite the financial dangers COVID continues to pose, there is cause for optimism. The track was able to weather the initial financial pressure aided by 70% of 2020 British GP ticketholders rolling their bookings over to this year and not asking for a refund. Pringle instructed his staff to make no quibbles on any bookings that did need to change as Silverstone is naturally keen to retain customers who“saved us”for the coming years too.

The track has also worked to address a structural imbalance in its events calendar – relying less on the success of the British GP each July. Examples of this include new events such as its‘lap of Lights’driving experience added at Christmas, and the Silverstone Interactive Museum attracting visitors throughout the year.