The 2022 British Grand Prix will move to earlier in the year than the race has been traditionally scheduled, with a provisional slot on the calendar for three weeks earlier than the usual August Bank Holiday weekend.
Instead, it will be held on August 7th, as the race looks set to become a back-to-back event with Austria’s Red Bull Ring race.
The news comes as the track prepares to welcome a sell-out crowd for this weekend’s race. Many fans were surprised that they were unable to secure last-minute tickets for the first MotoGP race to be held at the circuit since 2019 despite only half the number of tickets being made available compared to the 140,000 who attended last month’s F1 race.
Silverstone boss Stuart Pringle said expanding capacity at the last minute simply wasn’t possible.
“It’s great to be sold out,” he exclusively told The Race, “especially as we had a sold out Formula 1 British Grand Prix.
“The keen-eyed will note that the MotoGP number is lower than the F1 one, but the reason for that is that traditionally the MotoGP audience is about half of the scale of Formula 1.
“To be able to administer a crowd of the F1 size [pictured], we need to rent a lot of land for car parking, we need to put in a certain amount of infrastructure, we need to scale up to a wholly different event.
“The reason this year’s MotoGP race is sold out is that we’ve hit 20% above the traditional audience, and that was our compression on car parking, traffic management, stuff like that.
“By the time we got there, we didn’t have enough time to make contingencies – plus with general nervousness around COVID, we knew that this wasn’t the year to push it.
“It’s a sell-out for MotoGP, but does that mean that Silverstone isn’t capable of growing it to a higher level? Absolutely not. If we think we can be successful with our marketing and bring in an enhanced crowd, then we can deal with that – and it is very much my ambition.”
While Pringle is well aware that there have been circumstances like Valentino Rossi’s retirement announcement that helped ticket sales – and that it could mean that sales drop next year again – he’s also positive about the future of the event as the world starts to get back to normal.
He added: “What I think would be a good Sunday is people having a truly memorable experience that makes them go ‘I don’t want to not do that next year’.
“We’ve invested in good music artists, good entertainment, and the onus is on us to ensure that everyone can get in and out of the venue safely and efficiently, and that they feel safe in this COVID environment.
“It still amuses me that this funny old airfield where the lines were in many cases scribed in pencil on a chart on the wall still produces some of the best racing of the season because of that vast slipstreaming effect, the lead changing frequently.
“I hope that it’s just an exciting race and that people have a great time.
“What may have happened with the Rossi retirement effect is that we might have pulled people from our database who are infrequent visitors, and aggregated them in a single year.
“Hopefully we can get all of them to say ‘you know what, I don’t know why we’ve been missing this. It’s really cool.’ That – and no rain! – would be a good result for me.”
