British Grand Prix shake-up confirmed in bid to spice up Silverstone F1 race
Fans were treated to Lewis Hamilton's emotional win last year and the track is always good for a dose of drama. Now the British GP is getting some special treatment which is intended to add to the excitement.
In 2025, there's been a growing trend of teams attempting to use the one-stop strategy. The FIA even enforced a mandatory second pit stop for last month's Monaco Grand Prix in an effort to make the race more exciting, a decision which resulted in mixed reviews.
While there'll be no such rule change at Silverstone, Pirelli have stepped in to shake things up - and it's all to do with their tyre allocations. F1's rulebook requires drivers to use at least two different dry tyre compounds during a race - whether it be soft, medium or hard.
The rule is only voided if a race to deemed too wet. For the British GP, drivers will be forced to select between the C2 hard, C3 medium and C4 soft tyres across qualifying on the Saturday and Sunday's race.
That's softer than ever before at Silverstone, with increased tyre degradation likely encouraging teams to make more than one pit stop. This usually leads to more overtaking and wheel-to-wheel action as well as giving strategists a headache.
For the following Grand Prix in Spa-Francorchamps, Belgium on July 27 - also a Sprint race weekend - Pirelli has elected to introduce a gap in its tyre selection by using the C1 hard, C3 medium and C4 soft. The thinking behind skipping a compound change is that it'll make the hardest tyre considerably slower compared to the other options.
Pirelli's motorsport director, Mario Isola, recently explained: "If you want to go one stop hard/medium, you are penalised by the fact that hard is much slower. So someone could choose a more aggressive strategy with mediums and soft for the race."
For the two races either side of Britain and Belgium - this weekend's Austrian Grand Prix and August's Hungarian GP - the C3, C4 and C5 compounds will be used. There is one even softer compound, the C6, but it's thought not to be viable for those circuits.
McLaren star Oscar Piastri currently leads the Drivers' Championship with 198 points after 10 Grands Prix and two Sprint races. Team-mate Lando Norris is closely behind on 176 points, with four-in-a-row world champion Max Verstappen of Red Bull sitting in third place with just over half of the season remaining.
Formula 1 fans can watch every practice, qualifying and race live with Sky's new Essential TV and Sky Sports bundle in a new deal that saves £192.
As well as Sky Sports access, this includes more than 100 TV channels and free subscriptions to Netflix and Discovery+.
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