Silverstone - you monumental idiots!

One week after we got back from Silverstone and the British Grand Prix, it’s time to reflect on the experience and it falls into two areas for me: the racing and the camping.

Inside the circuit everything was as well organised as normal, and that’s a good thing. Despite some pretty crappy weather, the circuit had loads of crowd control people about, and generally everything worked just fine with one small exception. Entering the circuit at Club, we had to make our way to Becketts for the race day, as this was our grandstand. There is a small spectator tunnel to go through.

On the Becketts side of this tunnel was about a foot of standing water and mud with no way of avoiding it.

Silverstone should note, a couple of tons of gravel would have fixed this in a jiffy, so with this one small exception, a job well done and thus a nine out of ten.

The race was good, with the break in qualifying brought about by heavy rain, well handled.

Then we come to the camping. I pay to camp for Friday through Sunday night at the official Silverstone campsite - Woodlands.

Now, I will accept that the heavy rain was exceptional and as a result, the campsite was quite correctly closed to cars.

What I do not accept is the quite ridiculous way the campsite was organised (bad use of the word as in truth it was an almighty cock-up).

We got, with my 4WD car, to the front of the queue to be told by a bloke “park over there and then carry your stuff to the camp site”.

“Over there” was an already waterlogged and cut up field.

So we parked and as instructed unloaded our car (partially) and made our way to the muster point from where we’d “be taken into the camp site”.

Firstly, the muster point, and the farm vehicles onto which we were shepherded, were covered in mud and as a result, just getting on and off was beyond a challenge and bordering on bloody dangerous.

The driver of the tractor was in all probability a good tractor driver but beyond this, pretty useless. And when, upon arrival at the toilet block he, with a grin that showed he was enjoying this enormously, announced that this was as far as he went, we then endured the quite significant danger of getting off of the farm truck and into the mud. 

His drop off point was two full fields from our booked family space and when I asked, politely, if there were any trucks going that far, his look of positive enjoyment reached nearly orgasmic heights as he announced “no mate, you have to walk from here!”

So we walked, carrying tent and a whole load of camping paraphernalia, finally finding a spot in what looked suspiciously like a heavily overbooked camp site - had cars been allowed in as well, I have no doubt we would have not all fitted in.

Three trips is what it took to get my stuff from the car to the tent, and each time the smug git driving took the same joy in telling us where, literally as well as metaphorically, to get off.

Later that afternoon, we discovered that the farm buggies were now going to our field!!

Then we come to the Sunday, after the race when a lot of people were packing up to go home, were there any farm buggies in sight, were there heck!

Instead, what we had was a bunch of mindless hooligans masquerading as “official towing vehicles” mooning about the place cutting the surface up left right and centre.

One, rather hilariously, was a Toyota Hi-lux with street tyres. What this particular cretin did was slither around the tracks for several hours making matters worse.

At one point he decided to try an tow a caravan out of the site and promptly got stuck. He then had to be towed, with the caravan that he was supposed to be rescuing, by another vehicle.

On the Monday, I used my initiative to drive along the service road at the back of the campsite and thus got my car close to the tent, frankly this road could have been used very well by us arriving on Friday to at least get our stuff close to the site.

So, and here is my offer to the Silverstone management team. Next year instead of the numpty you had in charge of the wet weather plan for the campsite this year, use my 19-year-old daughter. She a bit dippy and can at times be a little lazy, but I have no doubt whatsoever that she will do a significantly better job than whoever did it this year.

This shambles will certainly make me consider if I should buy tickets for the 2013 race and maybe consider going somewhere with better infrastructure and organisational skills, India maybe.