Silverstone track talk with Robert Kubica

Silverstone is one of the most historic places we visit. It’s a high speed circuit – especially the first sector – and a lot of the corners offer a number of options for different racing lines.

The ideal set-up requires you to have a lot of high-speed stability because you need to have a good balance for a quick change in direction, particularly around the high-speed Maggotts and Becketts section of the lap. The key there is to get on the power as soon as possible to carry as much speed as you can down the Hangar straight.

Heading into Stowe, sometimes it can be tricky because the wind can play a big role on your car and have an effect on the overall grip and balance. Also, overtaking is not that easy at Silverstone because it’s so difficult to follow another car around many of the high-speed corners – you lose so much downforce that it’s very hard. But maybe with this new section, which has introduced a few slower corners, it might be a bit easier to overtake.

The first corner, Copse, is taken in seventh gear at about 290 km/h. It’s not quite flat, but it depends a lot on your speed and wind direction as you approach the corner. I remember a test in 2006 when there was a big head wind on the main straight and so Copse was flat out because we were about 10 km/h down on top speed because of the wind. I would be surprised if it’s flat this year.

At the moment I don’t know a lot about the new section that has been modified for this year’s race. To prepare for the race I will search for some videos of the track on the internet and, of course, I’ll walk the track on Thursday. It’s always quite interesting and challenging going through new corners when you have to discover the grip levels and the best line so the first few laps we do there on Friday morning will be very interesting.

The last corner, turn 17, is quite slow, taken in second gear at about 110 km/h. It tends to create quite a lot of understeer in the car, but it’s crucial to get a good exit. The danger is that sometimes you get snap-oversteer mid-corner, but because of the long nature of the corner you can gain a lot of lap time here. It’s quite tricky and depending on the traction of the tyres and balance you can adapt your line during the race in order to extract the maximum from the corner.