Newsflash: Silverstone Festival is still a classic. They can change the name and entice a wider audience with evening music acts for all the family, but at its heart the behemoth formerly known as The Classic remains an attraction for the hardcore historic fraternity. Races from dawn ’til dusk – 10 on Saturday, 10 on Sunday – come thick and fast. The themed demos add colour (even if 75 years of NASCAR was rained off on Saturday), but they’re mere punctuation marks amid the competitive action on the full 3.64-mile Grand Prix expanse. And the Festival has a key edge over Goodwood’s Revival too: it’s not hemmed in by a narrow period timeframe. Anything goes at Silverstone.
That much was clear late on Saturday afternoon when the Masters Endurance Legends evoked relatively recent Le Mans memories. Harindra de Silva’s Pescarolo LMP1 led away from a pole position earned by his son Tim, as Steve Brooks’s V8-powered, second-generation Peugeot 908 turbodiesel duelled with Jonathan Kennard’s newly restored Acura ARX-01b LMP2. Kennard led by the end of lap three and appeared set for a first-time-out victory until, with 22 of the 40 minutes to go, the Acura’s throttle cable snapped. That was cruel. After the pitstops, Brooks led de Silva Jr by 23.9 seconds, but the Portuguese smashed the lap
