Dominik Mitsch – Head of Marketing, Infiniti Red Bull Racing
Britain is one of the strongest markets for Formula 1 and with our team being based just down the road from here in Milton Keynes, we have a lot of requests internally and from our stakeholders and shareholders who want to come and join the team here. We have a massive number of fans here which is great for us and for the sport.
It’s not that we have so many more guests here than at other races but we do get a lot of senior people, CEOs and so forth. Then on the publicity side, we have a lot of celebrities who are happy to come here, given our proximity to London. And with Wimbledon being on and Henley Regatta and all these other sporting events taking place around this time, there are a lot of people in town.
For the weekend, Silverstone airfield is the busiest airport in Europe, as senior figures helicopter in and out to avoid the traffic. Logistically, it’s got better over the years: of course if it’s raining and muddy it can turn into a nightmare, but this year we seem to be lucky with the weather. Naturally, here with these country roads, traffic builds up and you get bottlenecks, but that’s part of Silverstone. You take it on the chin and people still keep coming.
It’s difficult get all our people here, be they our staff from the factory, or sponsor guests, because passes are so restricted . There is such a high demand from partners, sponsors and our board members etc. So we can’t fulfil too many internal requests which is a shame, as we’d like to show more of our factory staff what happens at a race. We buy some grandstand tickets as a company and they are given out on a first come first served basis and that’s as good as it gets unfortunately.
