Silverstone completes refunding process after 2012 weather chaos

Silverstone has completed its refunding process for customers who were forced to miss parts of the British Grand Prix weekend because of poor weather, AUTOSPORT has learned

The circuit was forced to advise fans with public car park passes not to attend Saturday's qualifying in order to ensure the venue was able to host a full attendance for the race, after traffic chaos and waterlogged campsites due to unprecedented levels of rainfall.

More than 10,000 ticket holders were eventually refunded at a cost of nearly £1million to the venue.

Click here for the exclusive story on the changes Silverstone is making to prevent a repeat of the 2012 British Grand Prix debacle

Silverstone managing director Richard Phillips told AUTOSPORT: "We beat ourselves up about what happened at the grand prix, but actually, other than a few thousand people of the 129,000 people that should have attended the event, a heck a lot of those people came in Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

"We know we had problems, which we put our hands up to, and we've done our best to refund people for Friday and Saturday.

"The criticism really came for the Friday, I don't think people were really criticising us for the Saturday - I think they understood the logic of that."

Phillips added that he believed Silverstone had managed to maintain its good relationship with the paying public, after years of hard work to improve the traffic infrastructure in the wake of the 2000 British Grand Prix mud bath.

"A lot of people say that we did the honourable thing and we've refunded the money," he said.

"Actually I think we have refunded slightly more than people were expecting in a lot of cases. So the majority of people are reasonably on side with it and have said so.

"Out of the people that we have refunded, you get the odd ones that are angry, but they are very few actually.

We didn't try to skin people...We've been very fair about it."