Visiting Silverstone...or Planes, Trains and Automobiles Revisited

My partner Stacy and I love to travel. Cheaply. Like really really cheaply. We've been to Europe many times together, and have yet to pay more than $500 each round trip. We are notoriously frugal on airfare, and would prefer to save a few bucks on the plane ride in exchange for staying another day or so while keeping to the same budget. We both figure, hey, the ride is just a few hours, and we're sleeping through most of it anyway. I'm very fortunate that we both share the same travel philosophy. That has led to some great adventures.

I love finding great deals on airfare, especially to Europe. My go-to service was Scott's Cheap Flights, where I'd find some really nice deals. Paris was $482 each round trip, Amsterdam $444 (direct on Delta no less), Barcelona $346, Venice $429. These deals show up a couple times a year, and you have to move quickly as they may only last a few hours. Luckily, we are both empty nesters with no pets and have some flexibility in vacations. Scott's Cheap Flights was eventually bought up and became Going.com. The deals weren't as good but with some patience, we could still find a nice bargain. London was on our travel list for many years, but Brexit fears put it on the back burner. Instead, we found other places to visit, opting to wait until things settled down so as to avoid any inconveniences related to Brexit. Then COVID hit, and London deals were scarce. By mid-2023 we finally found a decent flight on British Airways for $496 in late April 2024. Like most of our deals, it was a red-eye flight. Not a big deal, as Europe is a 6 hour time zone shift anyway, and we always built in some downtime on arrival to minimize jet lag. At that price, the seats are pretty atrocious, especially for 8+ hours. Despite this, even in the steerage section, you wake up in another country just like the more expensive seats. The rats, as they say, are of a manageable size.

Stacy is the planner in our relationship, which is awesome for me. She'd taken an interest in Formula 1, mainly from Netflix's Drive To Survive series. Watching this with me, Stacy realized how interesting (and handsome) the drivers were. For me, F1 was alway about the engineering and driving skill. Nonetheless, her interest in F1 made it easier to incorporate an occasional motorsports-related side quests on our vacations. In Paris, we took a day to see the lovely village of Le Mans. In Italy, we stopped to see the museums and factories of Pagani, Lamborghini, and Ferrari. Our Barcelona trip was so stupid cheap, we took a train through the French Riviera to spend a couple days in Monaco.

The legendary Silverstone track was but 80 miles from London, so we planned to go there after getting settled in and spending the rest of our vacation in London proper. I splurged a bit and bought a track experience in a Formula car. This would be around the smaller Stowe circuit, located inside the east section of the main track. Unsurprisingly, they don't let you take a Formula car by yourself on the bigger, faster full circuit. These single-seat cars look like Formula Fords with added side pods, maybe a Van Diemen or Lola chassis. This certainly gave the illusion of a much more serious car, but at 140hp, these are nothing like an F3 or F2 car, much less an F1 car. I doubt most people signing up for this really know the difference. These would actually be well below F4 in power and size, but still plenty given the weight is probably under 1000 lbs. I've driven some single seaters before, and they are quite exciting, if not brutal like a medieval torture device. The Stowe circuit doesn't share any turns with the Silverstone Circuit, but that didn't bother me.

The plan was to leave Friday evening on a British Airway red-eye, landing around 11am Saturday. We'd rest, get settled in, with nothing in particular planned until my Formula Experience at 2pm Sunday. We planned to make our way over to Silverstone Sunday morning, do a bit of sightseeing, visit their museum, and then take a spin around Stowe. That was the plan, at least.

Upon checking in Friday at the Atlanta airport, we were kindly informed that the flight was overbooked and we were on Standby. This wasn't good, especially since the next flight wasn't for another 24 hours. We waited at the gate, hoping for a couple no-shows, but eventually our tickets were cancelled. This knocked a day off our vacation, and put track time at Silverstone in jeopardy. There wasn't much we could do about it, so we went home and returned the next evening. Stacy worked with the Airbnb host and Silverstone to accomadate our changed schedule. We could still make Silverstone despite landing at 11am Sunday instead of Saturday. Good thing she planned a day as a buffer.

Of course, our flight was delayed some 90 minutes. We opted to go straight to the track, taking the Underground (the Tube, as the cheeky monkeys say). From there we grabbed a train out to the English countryside. The train passed through Milton Keynes, and right past the Red Bull Racing campus. I saw the Red Bull Powertrains building, home of the Honda F1 engine program. As a long time Honda fan, I pull for teams running their engines. As of 2025, that's been VCARB and Red Bull, but for 2026, the engine program is being rebranded under Ford. Following the 2026 regulation changes, Honda engine is powering Aston Martin, where they rejoin the legendary Adrian Newey, who also moved from Red Bull to Aston Martin. I'm also a huge fan of Newey, and if you like engineering and haven't had a chance to read his book, How to Build a Race Car, I highly recommend it. In 2026, I'll be swapping my Red Bull and VCARB merch for Aston Martin swag.

Our train ride ended in Wolverton, where we would need to hire a car to get us the last 15 miles to the circuit. Stacy was in touch with the track and they were very accommodating, pushing my time slot back to 4pm (the last possible for the Formula experience). Unfortunately, no cabs were readily available from the station and the Uber we ordered never showed up. We did manage to eventually get a ride and got to the circuit at 4:40pm. Just outside the track, we passed the massive Aston Martin / Aramco campus. Our original plan was to explore Silverstone and Milton Keynes during the whole day, but the flight delay ruined any extended sightseeing. We really didn't know where to go, as Silverstone is a massive complex. We disembarked at the museum, which promptly informed us we were at the wrong place. A maintenance crewman took pity on us and drove us around the back of the track in his truck. It was 5:00pm before we ran into the paddock building with our luggage to the Driving Experience center.

By that time, I was too late to actually get through the Formula Car experience. That experience needs about 90 minutes to complete, and involves a classroom session, a 10 minute lead-follow session on track, followed by a 20 minute self-paced session. Since the Formula car is a single seater, there's obviously no way for an instructor to ride along. All the additional time and training is needed because you'll be out on track by yourself, and you'll need to know a lot more about what to do than simply having an instructor sitting next to you. The staff at Silverstone, however, was amazing and still managed to accommodate me. Given the shortened time slot, they offered me a seat from the Ferrari Experience motor pool. I met with my instructor, and after informing him of my driving history and instructor background, we became fast friends. This actually saved us quite a bit of time, as we didn't have to start completely from scratch on matters of safety and track etiquette. He was actually a fan of Road Atlanta, so here we were, just a couple guys jealous of each other's home track. We were using the larger Silverstone circuit, which I was familiar with from video games and being an avid F1 fan. This also saved us time, and we were buckled in and off onto the main circuit in no time.

The dual-clutch F430 I was driving wasn't unfamiliar, as I've driven a few mid-engine Ferraris before, some at speed. I've also had a lot of seat time in mid-engine cars (I currently own three), so I knew what to expect. We navigated a few laps around Silverstone and I quickly found my braking, turn-in and shift points. I was just so happy to be there, experiencing a track that I've been watching for decades. The turns are legendary: Stowe, Maggotts & Beckets, Hanger Straight, Chapel. Experiencing Copse in the real world was stunning. It's a really fast turn, and I remember the massive shunt Verstappen had there in that infamous 2021 season. Roaring down the Hamilton Straight with a flat-plane Ferrari V8 over your shoulder is the experience of a lifetime. If the trip ended right then, I'd be happy. Every time I went up the front straight, I'd look at the painted grid positions and couldn't help but remember that racing giants have stood here. I'm not exaggerating to say that some, if not most, of the greatest drivers of all time have raced here. Ascari, Moss, Stewart, Clark, Villeneuve, Lauda, Prost, Senna, Mansell, Schumacher, Alonso, Hamilton, Vettel, and Verstappen have all been here. These giants are absolute racing royalty. Indeed, some of these drivers have actually been knighted: Sir Lewis Hamilton, Sir Sterling Moss, Sir Jackie Stewart. The feeling was indescribable, and it still stays with me today.

The F430 made all the right sounds, but overall I wasn't blown away by the handling. It showed quite a bit of understeer, even after the instructor let me turn the manettino to RACE mode. This is actually not uncommon with "tourist" track cars, and I've seen this before with many "experience" type vehicles. These cars are often tuned and aligned to lean towards understeer. Novice drivers have an easier time dealing with understeer (where the car turns less sharply than the steering angle is asking for) than oversteer (where the back end of the car rotates around). These types of cars are often far more powerful than what inexperienced drivers are used to, and the mid-engine layouts have a tendency to rotate quicker than a front-engine vehicle. Modern vehicle safety systems like airbags are also heavily biased for front-end collisions, so an understeering car that plows headfirst into a wall is preferable to spinning into the same barrier sideways or backwards. To keep things from getting too spicy, these high performance cars are often tweaked to safely understeer at their upper limits. Personally, I prefer my setups to be more neutral, even a bit loose depending on the track and car. But I completely understand and respect that a tourist-level high performance car at a race track with an instructor will have more understeer than Maranello intended. I did change my driving style a bit to minimize it, with earlier weight transfer and later apexes. Overall, a thoroughly enjoyable experience, thanks to the team at Silverstone that went well above and beyond to get me on track. It was, as a particular dutchman likes to say, "simply lovely".

Exhausted and jet lagged, we had dinner in the trackside Hilton Garden Inn. We were in such a rush to get to the track that I hadn't eaten since the night before in Atlanta. (expand)

Back in London, we spent the rest of the week doing all the London things. Big Ben, Piccadilly Circus, high tea, fish and chips, actual crumpets, riding in the classic black London cabs and red double decker buses. I also got to see literal medieval torture devices in the Tower of London. While the trip didn't start off as planned, it actually worked out better than originally intended. It wound up being less expensive too, as a few months after we got back, our claim with British Airways resulted in $3,000 back for our troubles.

One particular treat was seeing my favorite opera, Carmen. I've been a huge fan but never got to actually see Bizet's masterpiece. We were staying in the theater district and Stacy booked us tickets earlier in the year to see Carmen at the Royal Opera House. This amazing place is almost 300 years old and has hosted literal kings and queens. It reminded me that for the second time this trip, I was fortunate enough to be where royalty once stood.

Stay on track,

Benson

Tracks related to this blog

Silverstone

Imola

Monza

Monaco

Le Mans (coming soon!)