Silverstone Track Map Poster

Silverstone was a bomber base before it was a racetrack, and the airfield is still there: parts of its three wartime runways, laid out in a triangle, survive inside the outline of the lap. Around them, 5.891 km (3.66 miles) and eighteen turns run clockwise across the countryside on the border of Northamptonshire and Buckinghamshire, with just 11 meters (36 ft) of elevation change, less than a four-story building.

In 1948 the first race used the runways themselves. The course was marked out with oil drums and straw bales; where the runways ended in hairpins, cars raced headlong toward each other, with canvas screens to spare the drivers the view; and some 100,000 spectators watched from behind rope barriers. Two years later, Silverstone hosted the first race of the very first world championship for Grand Prix drivers, in front of the King and Queen: the first and only time a reigning monarch has attended a motor race in Britain.

With no hills to slow it down, Silverstone is all about speed. Grand Prix cars take Copse, Turn 9, at around 290 km/h (180 mph) with barely a lift; through the flicks of Maggotts and Becketts they pull more than 5 g sideways, more than five times their own weight; and on the Hangar Straight, named after the airfield’s largest hangars, which stood beside it, they have topped 320 km/h (200 mph).

The poster numbers all eighteen turns and letters in fifteen corners and four straights, from Abbey to the Hangar Straight, with the shorter National and International layouts traced in muted lines. Blueprint, the drafting-room edition, suits a circuit that is, at heart, the plan of an airfield. The world championship started here, which makes it a fine place to start a collection.