After a rain-affected weekend at the Red Bull Ring, Formula 1 comes home for the 2023 British Grand Prix – but how will the famously unpredictable UK summer weather affect the race itself?
The 2022 British GP saw a wet qualifying session where Carlos Sainz took his first-ever F1 pole position, and the Spaniard converted that into his maiden victory in an overcast but dry race.
As always seems to be the case, whether it’s likely to rain depends mostly on which forecast you choose to look at and how optimistic (or realistic) you are, but that makes it all the more unpredictable heading into the weekend.
Friday: Practice 1 & 2
The only certainty seems to be that Friday will be dry, warm and sunny. So pack plenty of sun cream if you’re going, because with temperatures set to rise past 25 degrees Celsius – and potentially touch the 30s, it could very well be a Silverstone scorcher.
What makes it interesting is that these temperatures are unlikely to be replicated on Saturday or Sunday, so teams will need to factor this dropoff into their strategy calculations and we could see the highest tyre degradation of the weekend on Friday.
Winds are getting into the double figures too and staying there for the weekend which is something else for drivers to think about on the pancake-flat circuit.
Saturday: Practice 3 & Qualifying
This is where things really get interesting. There’s thunderstorms predicted for the morning – so good luck to anyone driving in the support races – but that rain might clear up by the time qualifying rolls around.
FP3 could be a washout, but there’s still a better than one-third chance that some rain does fall around the 3pm local time that qualifying starts.
Basically, anything could happen and expect dark clouds over the circuit for most of Saturday regardless.
Temperatures should dip back below 25 degrees and wind speed remains upwards of 11mph.
Sunday: Race
Will it rain? Sorry to disappoint, but in all likelihood it will be a dry British GP. That’s not necessarily a bad thing by any means – Silverstone doesn’t need rain to make it interesting – but things look to have calmed down from Saturday.
There’s maybe a 20% chance of rain at the tail end of the grand prix while temperatures continue to cool to just above 20 degrees and the wind speed should be around 10mph, a bit down from qualifying.
