In August Pitpass' business editor Christian Sylt revealed that the British Racing Drivers' Club (BRDC) had finally found a buyer for Silverstone. The news came as a shock to the world of Formula One with one observer claiming that the BRDC has "sold some land but not the bits the racing world cares about."

It was far from the truth and in September the BRDC confirmed that it had indeed done a deal on Silverstone. It announced that property group MEPC had paid £32m for a 999-year lease on 280 acres of land surrounding the circuit. The BRDC also said it had agreed terms to sell a lease on Silverstone itself but did not confirm the sale price. This has at last come to light in an article written by Sylt in the Independent and it is truly stunning.

The article reveals that the BRDC has signed an agreement to sell Silverstone and 467 acres of track-related land for just over £10m which seems to be a snip by anybody's standards.

To put it into context, it is understood to be around 80% of the amount which Lotus F1 owes Kimi Raikkonen for his services this year. It is also around 10% of the value of Williams and only double the amount of money which the BRDC itself spent on paying staff last year. Fernando Alonso could afford to buy Silverstone twice just using the salary he will receive this year from Ferrari.

That's how little £10m is in F1 terms but there is good reason why Silverstone did not go for much more. It is a revelation which could shake the F1 circuit industry to its core the world over.

First, let's start with a bit of F1 history. The BRDC is of course a group of more than 800 senior motorsport figures and it took over the lease of Silverstone from the Royal Automobile Club in 1952. The site is a former airfield and hosted the first round of the F1 World Championship in 1950 which makes it one of the most historic tracks on the calendar. The BRDC bought the freehold to Silverstone from the Ministry of Defence in 1971 but it now wants to distance itself from the track which made a £3.3m net loss last year.

The losses have been partly driven by interest payments on debt taken out to fund construction of a new pit and paddock complex, known as the Wing, which opened in 2011. The BRDC built the Wing to upgrade Silverstone and help it land a 17-year contract to host the British Grand Prix from 2010. The BRDC's 2012 accounts show that it had to repay a £12.7m loan to Lloyds bank as well as £12.4m to Northamptonshire County Council. Interest payments on this came to £2.7m last year alone.

The sale of the land surrounding the circuit enabled the BRDC to pay off the debt so it would be perfectly rational to assume that this would put the club in a position to make guaranteed profits in future. Not so.

F1 race promoters generally do not get any revenue from the television broadcasts or corporate hospitality and advertising hoardings during the Grand Prix. Money from this goes to the rights holder the F1 Group leaving the circuits with ticket sales as their sole source of income from the sport. This usually barely covers the annual hosting fee with running costs often funded by investment from governments.

The British Grand Prix is a rare exception as it gets no state subsidies. It means that the BRDC has to try to cover the race running costs and hosting fee from ticket sales alone. This task is made all the more difficult by the fact that the hosting fee increases by an estimated 5% annually and this year came to an estimated £14m. As Sylt reported in June, this has driven up the British Grand Prix ticket prices to amongst the most expensive in F1. They started at £145 in 2013 making them more expensive than tickets to the men's final at Wimbledon and the Grand National.

The higher the ticket prices, the harder it is to fill the grandstands and cover the running costs and hosting fee for the race. It explains why the BRDC took the decision to distance itself from the track and this process began in 2009 when the members of the club gave the directors permission to sell a long-term lease on the circuit and surrounding land. The club then engaged accountancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers to contact potential investors and it entered into exclusive talks with a preferred bidder.

The talks fell through and in May last year the BRDC announced it had opened discussions with other parties. They finally came to fruition in September when the MEPC deal was announced. The sale of the lease on Silverstone itself has not yet closed but terms were agreed on 8 August 2013 when the BRDC signed a conditional binding agreement to sell its circuit business, Silverstone Circuits Ltd, along with a separate lease of the 467 acres of track-related land.

Since the terms were agreed before the BRDC's 2012 accounts had been filed, they needed to be adjusted to show the value of the circuit based on the sale price. It means that the sale price can be derived from detailed analysis of the accounts and the tip-off for this came in a letter dated 24 September 2013 from outgoing BRDC chairman Stuart Rolt to members of the club. Talking about the circuit value in the 2012 accounts Rolt said that "the revised value reflects the commercial value of the amounts offered for the business including up-front payments and the present value of future rental income."

The accounts show that at 31 December 2012 the track, plant and machinery had a value of £10.8m which is around a third of the amount that the BRDC spent on building the Wing.

Although the realisable value of the circuit is significantly less than the construction cost of the Wing, a spokesperson for the BRDC says "in fact, had the money not been spent to build The Wing and improve the circuit, there would have been no 17-year F1 contract, the circuit would have had no value, and the BRDC would not have been able to secure such a successful deal with MEPC, who were attracted by the on-going value of the Silverstone ‘brand'."

The sale price stands in stark contrast to the construction cost of purpose-built F1 circuits. A new 3.5-mile track, which is set to rival Silverstone, is being built in Wales and its management has forecast that it will cost £250m to build. It is the going rate but one wonders whether investors will be prepared to put that kind of money into circuits in future knowing that one of the most historic tracks on the calendar sold for around 4% of the typical construction cost. And let's not forget that Silverstone was recently upgraded and sits in a country which has some of the world's highest property values.