Silverstone Happy Despite Ecclestone Criticism

Formula One supremo Bernie Ecclestone may not have been impressed, but British Grand Prix organisers said on Sunday they were winning the battle to restore Silverstone's tarnished image.

After years of traffic congestion had threatened the circuit's future, new roads and an extensive revamp of parking facilities led to a considerable improvement following threats last year to drop the venue from the sport's calendar.

Ecclestone, however, was not impressed.

"I didn't come by road but I went round the circuit and I thought the general organisation was pretty bad really - inside the circuit," he told the BBC. "There were no signs. Nobody knew where anybody was going, nobody knew who was doing what. It was complete disorganisation.

"Inside the paddock is all right, and the roads thank God are all right. But the rest of it is typical. In fact, it's worse this year than it has ever been."

But Octagon Motorsports chief executive Rob Bain shrugged off the criticism, suggesting Ecclestone was upset after losing his way.

"I think Bernie arrived late and we had to land him at a different airfield because the cloud cover was so low," he told Reuters. "He came in without one of our circuit vehicles, came in to the south of the circuit without passes and ended up getting into customer flows rather than traffic flows.

"That slowed him and I think he got lost, which is unfortunate," he added. "It was important that we got him in easily but the weather and everything else...resulted in him getting lost."

Muddy Quagmires

Bain said memories of 2000, when newspapers splashed photographs of spectators wading through mud and cars bogged down in quagmires after battling through congested lanes, were history.

"Nothing has gone wrong so far," he said after the familiar Silverstone traffic chaos failed to materialise in the morning's 'acid test'.

"We've got the infrastructure right to get into the circuit, now we've got to get the actual circuit itself right in terms of the infield and that's where the focus will move for next year," he added.

"By May next year we'll have a fabulous new facility, a fabulous new pit and paddock and media centre, one that ranks alongside every other circuit on the Formula One calendar. We want to get the focus back on the racing and not on car parking and mud and everything else."

Organisers slashed race day ticket sales from 90,000 to 60,000 to minimise the risk of chaos, and Bain promised that next year would see a return to full capacity. But he also vowed to put people before profits.

"When people say 'Silverstone' the image is what the papers printed in that awful April of 2000 - pictures of mud," he told reporters. "We needed to reverse that image so people coming to the event do so in a very easy fashion and enjoy the racing.

"That's the image Silverstone has to portray and we're not going to compromise that by ramping capacity to a level that just creates traffic problems. In retrospect, I wish I'd released 90,000 tickets but we couldn't risk that."