The sequence consists of:
Maggotts — a fast right-handed sweeper at the end of the Wellington Straight, taken at approximately 280 km/h with a small lift but no significant braking in modern F1.
Becketts — a tight left-right-left transition that bleeds speed to around 240 km/h. The cars roll through a sustained S-curve that demands a perfectly placed front end and a settled rear.
Chapel — a final left-hander before the run down to Hangar Straight, taken at around 230 km/h.
The entire complex is named after Maggotts Field, Becketts Farm and Chapel Field — the farms and parishes whose land the original Silverstone airfield used during World War II.
The Maggotts-Becketts complex as it exists today is a 1991 creation. The pre-1991 Silverstone had a much simpler Becketts — a single, slower kink — and the cars passed through the area at moderate speed. The 1991 reconfiguration introduced the high-speed esses with the explicit goal of creating a corner sequence that would test the new generation of high-downforce 1990s cars without requiring the FIA-mandated 200+ km/h corner-speed reductions that were starting to plague European circuits in the post-Senna era.
The result was a sequence that has consistently been ranked by drivers as among their favourite in world motorsport. Lewis Hamilton has repeatedly cited Maggotts-Becketts as his favourite corner combination on the F1 calendar; Fernando Alonso, Sebastian Vettel and Max Verstappen have offered similar verdicts.
What sets Maggotts-Becketts apart is its alternating load: the car's centre of gravity shifts side-to-side four times in less than ten seconds, at speeds high enough that aerodynamic downforce is the dominant grip-source. A sequence like this is uniquely revealing: a car that is fundamentally aero-unbalanced cannot hide it through Maggotts-Becketts. The complex has historically separated the genuinely best drivers from the merely fast ones, because finding the rhythm to keep the car loaded through every transition requires car control of a kind that doesn't translate to track time on simple slow corners.
The complex is also one of the few places on the F1 calendar where a driver can lose more than a second to a faster lap — or gain it — without a single overtaking opportunity arising. The 2017 Bottas-Verstappen battle through this section, where Verstappen passed Bottas around the outside of Chapel, is often cited as a modern reference for what wheel-to-wheel high-speed driving looks like.
The Maggotts-Becketts-Chapel sequence is one of the most-driven corner combinations in sim racing. Assetto Corsa's ks_silverstone has it; ACC's silverstone has the post-2010 Wing-Pits configuration; iRacing's silverstone/gp has a recent laser scan; AMS2's Silverstone_2020 is the modern layout. The sequence appears in the COTA sim corpus as a deliberate architectural quote (Turns 3-6 at COTA are explicitly modelled after it).
The Maggotts-Becketts complex has been quoted in modern circuit design at least three times:
COTA's Turns 3-6 (designed by Hermann Tilke and explicitly described as a "Maggotts-Becketts quote")
The Esses at Suzuka (Turns 3-7) share the same philosophical lineage, though they predate the 1991 Silverstone redesign
A planned high-speed sweeper sequence at Saudi Arabia's Qiddiya circuit draws directly on the Maggotts-Becketts model