Not to footballpost but why are all the football confederations weird acronyms. AFC and CAF make sense independently but are silly together, CONCACAF sounds like a sci-fi drink, CONMEBOL is a very weird portmanteau and UEFA is a sneeze, not an acronym.

Feeder series penalty roulette from yesterday🧵: F2 was tame for once; Boya got 5s for pitlane speeding during the race, and that was it. F3, on the other hand.... de Palo (1st) was disqualified because his diffuser was too low. Trident said it was due to in-race damage, the stewards didn't buy it.

I'd been worrying about this with LMP2 this year, but apparently it's going to be an issue for Hypercar as well - Oreca just don't have the engineering capacity to support all the current ORECA OEMs wanting to make a 2030 car in time for 2030.

Based on the F3 penalties as we're coming through I think the final podium's going to wind up being Gladysz, Slater, Ugochukwu....

I don't think it would have made a difference in the end - Villagomez probably would have finished about 1.5 seconds rather than 3 behind had he pitted a lap earlier. But they were definitely wrong...

Tasanapol Wasnttoblameforthat

Feel VAR have definitely gone at least one lap too far here. Sure, the soft was slower than the hard by lap 6 at the start, but that was on full fuel!

Overtake at Becketts for the virtual lead in the F2 feature. Don't see that every day.

Looking like the alternate strategy might actually be the correct choice here (though it relies on not getting a safety car in the early stage).

Given quite how much money a Sunday ticket costs at Silverstone I'm quite surprised at how not-fill the stands are for the F2 feature race...

One-upping the other races in this case it was the driver i third that took the lead at the start...

Stenshorne with the extremely rare pre-Mechachroming!

Palmowski and Baettig have both scored podium finishes in F4 series at Silverstone before; Palmowski probably gets slight bragging rights since she did it in a non-reverse grid race, but on the other hand it was GB4 rather than British F4 and the latter has a slightly higher standard.

Possibly the first race at Silverstone wherein two out of the three podium positions are held by drivers sponsored by bathroom products, though I wouldn't like to try researching that.

I....have no idea what Ferreira was doing there. The racing line is the outside!

Both the races at Silverstone this morning the driver in second has got away substantially better than the one on pole (Slater held the lead through some rather aggressive tactics; Baettig did not).

From a championship perspective, Slater is now 21 points behind Ugochukwu and has lost something like 22 points from being hit by his team-mates in the last two rounds.

If De Palo gets to keep that win I will be amazed.

Definitely bad luck for Slater to get the safety car just as he was beginning to launch his counterattack for the lead. Single lap means no DRS....

Watching the F1A reverse grid race and being amused by the fact that since Chiara Bätting is, well, Chiara Bätting, ie her name starts Bä, her tower identifier is BAE.

1/2 FWIW, I think you _can_ win Le Mans with an LMDh (Cadillac might have done it this year, had the #38 not had a power steering failure), but it's harder. I don't think that the ACO actually consciously favour LMH cars, but in practice it's the same effect - at least if you know what you're doing

Pretty sure commentary just called the driver in second "Nikola Sodoff"

Maini's performances this year pretty much underscore how much of a general disappointment the F2 field has been overall.

Suspicious about Tsolov's start there he looked like he got a big jump.

Not as good as the F3 sprint, but definitely an entertaining half-hour....

Russell complaining about Cops(e) on the radio, sounds like the sort of thing you'd expect from a union leader I guess.

Silverstone's interesting from the "yo-yo" perspective because of how the two actual overtaking zones are nowhere near each other on track.

In this sprint, the role of Yevan David will be played by Lando Norris.

Catching up on Shanghai Formula E race 1 before the F1/F2 sprints and, um, we bring safety cars out for there being a monsoon at T7, which is fair enough FE doesn't really have wet tyres, but then send it back in in exactly the same conditions...

Also what on earth is up with this timetable the F1 sprint is before the F2 sprint.

Well that was mad. First half of F3 sprint, this is a procession, I should go back to sleep. Second half of F3 sprint, AAAAAAAAA everything is happening in the top 10 all at once.

Realised I'd not watched the last GB4 race of last weekend from Donington. Turns out the drivers weren't significantly less forgetful about things than I was... (you will not be surprised to learn this brought out a red flag)

One should note that GT Open Hungary is "supported" by both FREC and GB3, and Silverstone also has F1A; there's a _lot_ of feeder series racing this weekend.

Alex Dunne not happy with something? Unpossible.

Impressive work from Freddie Slater though, to take pole position after (officially) not managing to complete any laps in free practice....

Ugochukwu under a certain amount of pressure here as both his first two laps are ruled out for track limits, particularly with Slater on pole making it not an ideal place to end up at the back.

I am apparently permanently unable to remember which of Sebastian Montoya and Sebastian Wheldon is which.

I feel like I ought to have known the name of the race director for F2 and F3 but I can't have done as I would certainly have remembered "Simon Gnana-Pragasam" if I'd seen it before.

This is 2.36 seconds slower than last year's FP1, which feels like kind of a lot but is actually less than the gap in Australia or Japan which were both over three seconds, so Silverstone is apparently only bad rather than actually terrible.

Yep, they did indeed disqualify Slater from, err, a non-competitive session. After it finished. And levy no other sanction. Apparently the fuel requirement is a new thing which is presumably why we're seeing these for the first time this weekend; I would suggest, FIA, you acquire actual penalties...

Not really an open mind you need is it, more an open wallet...

Ho to be penalised for showing too much leg.

Huh. 5 is Slater, because of course it is, nothing can actually just work for him. But what is even the penalty for not providing a fuel sample in free practice? Normally you get disqualified from the session but...that isn't even meaningful in this case!

The "big 3" summer multiclass series now all have their calendars out, which combined look like this. A decent job of avoiding each other overall given other constraints. (Also with how oversubscribed these series are these days I've limited sympathy for people fortunate enough to be in two).

Meet the new calendar, same as the old calendar. Well. Barcelona is a month earlier leaving a big gap before Ricard (but otherwise it would have clashed with WEC), and Silverstone and Portimao are both a week earlier, probably in theory to help with AsLMS logistics.

You would think that Slater ought to be at an advantage on his "home" track but actually I'm pretty impressed by this because the only time Slater has raced at Silverstone since Ginetta Juniors was a guest appearance in GB3 last year....

Lego cars (apparently) not reflecting Silverstone special liveries, 0/10 would not lego again

I haven't read anything from Mercedes explaining why they're blue this weekend so I'm just headcanoning it as a Tyrrell throwback.

Now if this was a Formula E race we wouldn't add anything further on at this point as it was in the last five minutes, which is a plan I can get behind as I have stuff to be doing.

Between dropping their overall best performing IndyCar driver because he's not done great on ovals and being not particularly interested in IMSA despite North America being probably McLaren Automotive's biggest market I wonder if this "Triple Crown" stuff is getting a bit out of hand at Woking.