Five fast facts from the 2023 British Grand Prix

Williams Racing enjoyed another point-scoring Sunday in 2023, with Alex Albon's P8 finish sending us up to P7 in the Constructors' standings.

While it wasn't quite points this time on the other side of the garage for Logan Sargeant, P11 was a career-best finish for our young American after another strong performance.

Best of all, these results from Sunday's race continued our impressive performances from Friday and Saturday, when we repeatedly mixed it with the upper midfield spots.

In case you missed all of the fun because you were enjoying the action live at Silverstone, here are five fast facts from the 2023 British Grand Prix.

Approaching the halfway point of the season, we have 11 points to our name, meaning we're enjoying our best opening 10 rounds to a Formula 1 season since 2017.

Our 2021 campaign tally of 23 points is a little buoyed by George Russell's maiden podium in the two-lap Belgian Grand Prix, where he picked up nine points, but we're about halfway to matching that season with 12 rounds left.

We now have three points-scoring races to our name and four Q3 appearances in 2023, with the FW45 upgrades showing their worth in recent rounds.

Albono's P8 qualification means that’s now three races in a row where his single-lap speed has led to Williams Racing enjoying a top-10 starting position.

While any significant rain stayed away from Silverstone during the Grand Prix, the drivers had to handle yet another weekend of watching the skies.

FP3 and Qualifying's Q1 saw showers fall on Silverstone to trigger a sea of umbrellas in the general admission areas and uncovered grandstands.

The threat of a sudden downpour made for a busy Q1 track, and each driver did their best to get a hot lap on the board before the rain would stop any improvements.

Albono and Sarge made it through Q1, even with some track limit lap deletions and a trip through the grass to keep us on our toes.

Inadvertently, the rain showed our FW45's speed wasn't solely on the straights, with the race director keeping DRS disabled during Q1 and Q2, putting more emphasis on general car setup than being slippery in a straight line.

Great Britain is now the fifth consecutive round where rain has affected proceedings, with Monaco, Spain, Canada, and Austria all featuring wet weather and inclement conditions at some point.

It may sound cliche, but racing at Silverstone is special. That's largely because the supporters come out in their droves.

The British Grand Prix is growing into a bigger event each year, and the organisers bringing along the likes of Calvin Harris and the Black Eyed Peas helped the festival atmosphere grow again in 2023.

We were amazed that 440,000 fans came along to our last Silverstone trip, but 2023 beat that number.

Organisers said this year's British Grand Prix had 480,000 fans enter the venue over the course of the event, and some 160,000 turned up for race day to see Albono secure P8. Wow.

We're thrilled with Alex's latest top-10 finish, and his P8 has added four more points to our 2023 scorecard.

To do so at our home race is the icing on the cake, especially with the British GP proving a tricky hunting ground for us in recent years.

Although we've now enjoyed Q3 appearances for three successive seasons at Silverstone, our British GP Sundays sadly hadn’t gone as well until now.

Our last point-scoring finish here came back in 2017 when Felipe Massa took P10, and it's our best finish at home since 2015 when we took P4 and P5 after leading the race's early laps.

Although they looked the same from the outside, Pirelli brought a new specification of their slick tyre to Silverstone.

The Italian manufacturer hopes the updated construction will prove "more resistant to fatigue" than the old spec, and they brought the change forward from a planned 2024 introduction.

The actual compounds — the C1, C2, and C3 in Silverstone's case — remained the same, but the new construct, coupled with relatively mild temperatures, saw drivers running long distances on all tyre compounds.

Logan's 23-lap final stint on the soft tyres suddenly became a viable strategy after we saw George Russell go 28 laps into the race on a set of red-walled rubber.

The durability of the softs actually had Sarge take his Pirellis around Silverstone for more laps than either McLaren driver put on their hard compound tyres in the race's final stages. Lando Norris clocked up 19 laps, and Oscar Piastri, 23.

Expect more degradation in Hungary, though — we'll have the C3, C4, and C5, in other words, the softest tyre trio, available to use.