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the grid, cars pull away and the straight allows
speeds of 175 mph to be reached on the approach to
Copse. This right-hand corner is blind but, at 140
mph, very fast, so fast in fact that drivers
don’t normally brake – just change down a
gear. Switching back up, cars thunder on towards
Maggots at 175 mph and shift down twice as they
wave their way first through Maggotts and then
Becketts – as the track wiggles left-right,
left-right, slowing down to 100 mph before Chapel
ends the series of left-right bends and is
accelerated through, coming out at 155 mph in 6th
gear.
The Hanger Straight
is the fastest part of the circuit, at 185 mph in
top gear, before braking hard into Stowe, a
right-hand turn that can be taken in 4th gear and
speeds of 105 mph maintained. Vale is a quick
straight in which the cars go through at something
like 160 mph with a 2nd-gear, sharp left into
Club, a right-hand corner taken at 50 mph and then
accelerated through and the cars swing back on
themselves at 130 mph. Both Vale and Club present
good overtaking opportunities, not least because
they are tricky to negotiate and understeer comes
into play. Up through two gears into 6th and 170
mph towards Abbey, a 3rd-gear, 75 mph corner which
flips into Farm at 100 mph and up to 160 mph along
Farm Straight.
Bridge marks the
entrance to the ‘Complex’, a section of the
track containing bends at Priory, Brooklands and
Luffield. The corners at Bridge and Priory are
fast, entering the first at 150 mph and exiting
the second at 100 mph. Priory, along with
Brooklands, steer the car through 180 degrees.
Brooklands, along with Luffield, again turn the
car around and are both negotiated in 2nd gear at
between 50-80 mph. Luffield used to be two corners
called Luffield 1 and Luffield 2 prior to 1996. On
exit, it’s a quick dash through Woodcote at 165
mph and a smooth turn to the right before hitting
the Start-Finish straight at 175 mph. At the start
of 1998 Silverstone re-named the sequence of
corners from Priory to Luffield as ‘The
Grandstand’ and intends to install more
grandstand steating in this area.
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