by Our Sports Desk

THE eyes of the sporting world will be fixed on Silverstone this Sunday when the Northamptonshire circuit hosts the British Grand Prix.

The calendar has been fairly kind to the race this year, with Wimbledon having started late enough to avoid any serious overlap and the Women’s World Cup taking place overnight.

Up to 140,000 people are expected to head for the track, yet the build-up to the race has been subdued. So far this year the racing has been tepid and the results predictable.

Either Lewis Hamilton or Nico Rosberg, in a dominant Mercedes, have won all but one of the races. The pair also triumphed in 16 of the 19 races in 2014.

While Silverstone is braced for record crowds this weekend, the same cannot be said around the globe. Spectators at the last race in Austria were down 40 per cent on the previous year. The grand prix circus was scheduled to park up in Germany in a fortnight’s time, but that race has been cancelled. The interest is not there and nor is the money.

A Grand Prix Drivers’ Association Global Survey, released at May’s Monaco Grand Prix and designed to quiz fans about the current state of the sport returned an emphatic verdict this week.

Almost 90 per cent do not believe F1 is providing enough entertainment. Less than one in 10 of the almost 220,000 fans surveyed believe the sport is in a better state than it was five years ago. Most described F1 as “boring.”

“There is always criticism,” Jenson Button said this week. “I watched a race from the ’70s and there was criticism back then, too. It is always there but you have to make sure you listen to it and learn from it.”