The championship that crashed itself

Schumacher and Hill collide fighting for the lead

Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill went into this race as the two men who mattered. Schumacher led the championship by eleven points. Hill drove for Williams (Formula One team). He had won here the year before and wanted to win again in front of his home crowd. His wife was due to give birth any day.

Hill took pole position and led from the start. Schumacher used a one-stop strategy. Early on he got stuck behind a Ferrari but used his lighter fuel load to slip ahead once it pitted. By lap 41 Schumacher was leading. Hill had already made two stops and was chasing him down.

Four laps later, on the approach to the corner known as Priory, Hill tried to take the lead back. He dived down the inside. Schumacher held his line. The two cars touched and both spun into the gravel. Both retired from the race.

Neither man could argue his way out of it afterward. The stewards took no action. The collision handed the race to a driver nobody had backed that weekend.

Herbert inherits a first win from their wreckage

Johnny Herbert had started fifth for Benetton. He was well off the pace of Hill and his own teammate Schumacher. He had barely finished a lap in either of the two previous races. His own team had whispers it wanted to replace him with a test driver. When Hill and Schumacher took each other out, Herbert was suddenly running at the front with nobody left to beat.

He held the lead to the finish. It was his first win in Formula One. He had started 71 times before. Jean Alesi came home second in a Ferrari. David Coulthard came third for Williams. For Benetton it was a fifth win of the season. The win came from somebody else's mistake rather than their own pace.

Mansell's crowd swallows his own slowing-down lap

Three years earlier, this same stretch of track had already shown what a home crowd could do to a result. Nigel Mansell took pole and led every lap of the 1992 race, becoming the most successful British driver in Formula One history at the time. His win was clean. What happened after it was not.

Fans poured onto the circuit to celebrate before Mansell had even made it back to the pits. His car was swallowed by the crowd on the slowing-down lap. Marshals had to clear a path and drive him in themselves so he could stand on the podium.

A man in a kilt undoes Trulli's race

Eight years after Hill and Schumacher wrecked each other's afternoon, the race got taken away from its leader by something nobody could have predicted. Jarno Trulli ran at the front for the opening eleven laps in his Renault, ahead of pole-sitter Rubens Barrichello.

Then a man in a saffron kilt ran onto Hangar Straight, straight into the path of cars doing 170 miles an hour. He was a former priest, defrocked not long after. The safety car came out. Almost the entire field pitted at once, and the order that came out the other side had nothing to do with who had been fastest. Kimi Räikkönen ended up in the lead by lap 30 and finished third. Barrichello recovered to win it. Trulli's race, built on pace, was undone by a man on foot.

Hamilton drives away from the field in the rain

Lewis Hamilton arrived under real pressure. He'd gone scoreless in the two previous races and dropped to fourth in the standings. Heavy rain fell over the whole weekend.

He started fourth and passed both rivals on the opening lap. On lap five, in conditions other drivers were backing off in, he took the lead outright and never gave it up. He won it going away, in a drive that is still ranked among the best wet-weather performances the sport has produced.

A pre-1966 car kills its driver here

At the Silverstone Classic in 2014, a historic racer competing in a pre-1966 Formula One car was killed in a first-lap crash. The circuit made Herbert's win possible. It undid Hill and Schumacher. It has also taken a life from a field of cars built decades before any of them.