No clear pattern

The driver's final times to the right do not show any clear pattern. Why is this? We would expect as cars improve over the years, for final times to drop.

Instead, we see times constently just over 5,000 seconds (most Silverstone races have the P1 finish in 80 to 90 minutes), with the exception of 2014 and 2021.

What happened these years?

Red Flags

One important note is that during red flags, when the race is stopped and drivers need to pit, the drivers final time continues to run.

Between 2010 and 2021, Silverstone has only had two red flags... you guessed it... in 2014 and 2021.

Once the time under red flags is removed, 2014 and 2021 start to make more sense.

However, this doesn't explain everything. We still are not seeing the improvement we expected to see over the years as the cars improve.

Max's 2021 Silverstone crash, causing a red flag

Looking at the number of laps completed, every race was 52 laps. There are some drivers who completed less because of being disqualified, but this does not help explain why we are not seeing improvement over the years.

None of these races were out of the ordinary for the number of NCs, either.

Maybe instead of overall track time, fastest lap will show improvement over the years.

As you can see, from 2010 to 2021, the fastest lap time slowly improved.

One value that does not seem to follow the pattern is the 2010 fastest lap.

This was likely because between the 2010 and 2011 Grand Prix races, the Silverstone track was edited and the finish line was moved to a different part of the track. So the 2010 time cannot fairly be compared to the rest.