EVENT: SILVERSTONE FESTIVAL, SILVERSTONE WHEN: AUGUST 23-25

Grids of up to 60 cars, 20 races and an unrivalled array of period racing machinery makes the Silverstone Festival a stand-out of the historic racing season.

For many, the Festival is a celebration of the car and a burgeoning live music festival with some racing added on. However, for the more dedicated enthusiast, there is a monster race programme of 20 races on the Grand Prix circuit from some of the best historic categories.

Now settled on the late-August weekend, the Festival is an unrivalled celebration of historic racing spanning the Pre War era through to as recent as five years ago. However you look at it, this is an event on a grand scale. It is so big that the racing programme uses both of Silverstone’s paddocks to the full.

The big focus this year will be a celebration of Ayrton Senna. Three decades on from his tragic death at Imola, an unrivalled gathering of Senna cars will be a poignant central theme and will honour his Silverstone heritage both from F1 and junior single-seaters.

In racing terms, the sound of the glorious Cosworth DFV will rent the

Northamptonshire air in the Masters Racing Legends double-header for three-litre Formula 1 cars up to 1985. Another headline grid will be the earlier generation of Post War Grand

Prix cars from the Historic Grand

Prix Cars Association.

Back on the agenda is a race for sublime pre ’63 GT cars, while slightly newer GT cars from up to 1966 will make a fine spectacle in the International Trophy.

The Pre War focus will be on the sportscars of the 1920s and ’30s as Bentley, Alfa Romeo, Aston Martin, Bugatti and Fraser Nash go into battle.

Appropriately for a Senna celebration event, Formula 3 will be back in style with the French-based F3 Classic Interseries for the era of cars in which Senna really made his name before leaping into F1. Historic Formula 2, Touring Cars and more recent endurance and GT cars all add to an incredible line-up of racing.

It’s wall-to-wall action on-track with qualifying all day Friday and racing all day Saturday and Sunday. Just watching so much good racing is almost a sensory overload, and that’s before you consider all the other attractions in and around the event. It is massive! PL

‘Senna’s life will be celebrated in style’

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