2016 Formula One season

The **2016 Formula One season** will be the 67th Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA) Formula One world championship, a motor racing championship for Formula One cars which is recognised by the sport's governing body, the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA), as the highest class of competition for open-wheel racing cars. Teams and drivers will compete for the World Drivers' and World Constructors' Championships. The season was scheduled to commence in Australia on 3 April, the latest start to a season since 1988, however, was pushed back to 20 March after complaints were made.

## Teams and Drivers

### Team Changes

* Haas F1 Team, a team established by NASCAR Sprint Cup Series team owner Gene Haas, will join the Formula One grid in 2016 after the team was accepted to join the championship for the 2015 season before Haas deferred his entry by a year. The team will use power units supplied by Ferrari.
* Marussia will switch from Ferrari to Mercedes power, with the team upgrading to a 2016-specification engine after having used a year-old Ferrari engine in 2015. The team will undergo a management reshuffle following the resignation of team principal John Booth and sporting director Graeme Lowdon. Following the collapse of HRT in 2012 and Caterham in 2014, the resignations of Booth and Lowdon mark the departures of the last key figures involved in the sport's expansion in 2010.
* Red Bull Racing will formally end their nine-year partnership with engine supplier Renault at the end of the 2015 season,with the team citing the lack of performance from the Renault Energy-F1 2015 engine as a leading factor in the change. The team will instead use Renault engines rebadged as TAG Heuer. Team principal Christian Horner named Renault's partnership with Mario Illien and his company Ilmor as a reason for staying with the manufacturer.
	+ Horner said that the team had held exploratory talks with the Volkswagen Group about entering the sport as an engine supplier, but that negotiations came to a halt following the emissions scandal that broke in September 2015. Plans to obtain power units from Mercedes, Honda, and Ferrari fell through as well.
* Renault will return to Formula One as a full factory-supported team after they purchased Lotus from Genii Capital, the venture capital firm they had originally sold the same team to in Template:F1, and supplied engines to up until the end of Template:F1. Lotus' participation in the 2016 season was in question pending the resolution of a High Court case brought against the team by HM Revenue and Customs over unpaid PAYE tax.
* Scuderia Toro Rosso will return to using Ferrari power units, as they had done so prior to the start of 2014, after Renault announced that they would no longer supply customer engines.  The team will use the 059/4 power unit used by Ferrari teams in 2015 after Ferrari received approval from the World Motor Sport Council to supply year-old engines on the grounds that the extensive revisions to the engine design meant that they would not be able to manufact additional 2016 specification engines in time for the start of the season.

### Driver Changes

* Romain Grosjean will leave Lotus at the end of the 2015 season. He will join the newly formed Haas F1 team for 2016, where he will be joined by former Sauber driver Esteban Gutiérrez. Gutiérrez will return to competition after spending a season as Ferrari's test and reserve driver.
* Having already secured contracts for Jenson Button and Fernando Alonso, McLaren chose not to renew the contract of Kevin Magnussen, who entered a single race for the team in 2015.
* Jolyon Palmer, the 2014 GP2 champion, will make his race début with Lotus, replacing the departing Grosjean. Palmer had previously made regular free practice appearances with the team in 2015.

## Rule changes

### Technical regulations

* Cars will be required to be designed with a separate wastegate for exhaust gasses to pass through—colloquially dubbed the "screamer pipe"—in a bid to increase the noise of the cars following criticism since the introduction of the 2014 generation of engines.
* Tyre supplier Pirelli will introduce a fifth tyre compound known as "ultrasoft". Pirelli will change their approach to tyre supply in 2016, bringing three compounds to races instead of two and allowing teams the freedom to choose which compounds they use.

### Sporting regulations

* Starting in 2016, the number of pre-season tests will be reduced from three to two.
* The stewards will be given greater powers in enforcing track limits, with drivers required to stay between the white lines marking the edges of the circuit, except in cases of driver error. The change was introduced after an investigation by Pirelli into Sebastian Vettel's high-speed blow-out at the 2015 Belgian Grand Prix that concluded that Vettel's off-track excursions had been a significant factor in the incident.
	+ The FIA is also exploring a number of solutions to discourage drivers from abusing track limits and aid in their policing, including GPS tracking, the reprofiling of kerbs, the installation of pressure-sensitive sensors and the use of high-speed cameras.
* Any driver who causes the start of the race to be aborted will be required to start the race from pit lane at the restart.
* The procedure for issuing gearbox penalties will be amended so that penalties are applied in the order that they are awarded, bringing the system in line with the wider grid penalty system.
* The process new drivers go through in order to qualify for a superlicence will be changed, with additional restrictions put in place as part of the wider FIA Global Pathway. The changes were introduced following controversy surrounding Max Verstappen qualifying for a superlicence at the age of sixteen after a single season competing in European Formula 3.

## Calendar

A leaked schedule released in April 2015 suggested that the Formula One calendar would begin on the 3rd April, two weeks later than previous years as well as being the latest start since 1988. In May 2015, FOM confirmed that the proposed calendar had been leaked, featuring 21 races across 34 weeks. The dates represented below are the dates provided by the proposed calendar.

### Calendar changes

* The European Grand Prix will be held for the first time since 2012 with the race to be held on a street circuit in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. The race will be run under the name "Baku European Grand Prix".
* The German Grand Prix is set to return to the Hockenheimring, after failing to find a host venue after the Nürburgring pulled out in 2015.
* Despite holding contracts to a race, the Korean and Indian grand prixs as well as the ill-fated Grand Prix of America (which has already been cancelled three times prior to this season) were not included in the leaked provisional calendar.

## Footnotes

1. ↑ After a falling out in the 2015 season, Red Bull decided to try and find another engine supplier. They were only offered a 2015 Ferrari. They eventually decided to go with a Renault engine for 2016, rebranded as TAG-Heuer (who recently sponsered them) and will develop the engine with adivsors Illmor.
2. ↑ Toro Rosso will use Ferrari's 2015 engines
3. ↑ Renault announced the purchase of Lotus F1 Team, but have yet to confirm the team's identity.

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