- 2016 f1 season predictions drivers#
- 2016 f1 season predictions driver#
- 2016 f1 season predictions full#
Manor have been in F1 since the start of 2010 in three distinct guises.
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With sweeping regulation changes set to arrive 12 months from now, don't be surprised if Renault give up on their car before the summer break and switch all their focus to 2017. The 2016 season will be one of rebuilding and setting the foundations for future success.
2016 f1 season predictions driver#
The engine that caused so much trouble for Red Bull last year will undoubtedly take a step forward over the winter, but it won't be enough to put it on a par with the Mercedes or Ferrari.Īnd making the team's task harder still, the Renault will be driven by one of the weakest driver lineups ever seen at a works team -Pastor Maldonado and Jolyon Palmer. And that car won't have the powerful, chassis-flattering Mercedes power unit it had in 2015 -it'll have a Renault. The paperwork was only completed in December, so new faces will have little chance to influence the overall direction of the 2016 car.
2016 f1 season predictions full#
These existing staff will be joined by a flood of new recruits as Renault builds a squad worthy of its status as a full works outfit.īut the French manufacturer will have to wait until 2017 before any kind of renaissance occurs. Renault's decision to buy struggling Lotus secured hundreds of jobs at the team's Enstone base. The constructors' championship will undoubtedly head back to Brackley for the third year in a row, but -unless Mercedes change their ways and throw all their efforts behind their best driver -the race for the drivers' title could be a somewhat closer affair. 1s and far more closely matched than Vettel and Kimi Raikkonen, will not have the same luxury. Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg, equal No. 1 at Maranello, he'll always be maximising his points and running the best possible strategies. Qualifying may remain the domain of the Silver Arrows, but race-pace -where Ferrari tended to be stronger last year -will be a different story. This is a good thing for Ferrari heading into the new season, because the regulations are remaining stable -and the closer a team is to the optimum achievable performance under a given set of regulations, the harder it is to find improvements.įerrari, with their huge budget and wealth of technical talent, should therefore find it easier to make gains over the winter than Mercedes. This indicates a substantial chunk of the lap-time difference between them and Mercedes was in the performance of the SF15-T chassis relative to the W06. As the season entered its second half, their deficit to Mercedes in pure power terms was relatively small -just 10 horsepower or so, according to Andrew Benson of BBC Sport. The Scuderia made huge strides in terms of power-unit performance over the winter of 2014/2015. Only this time, there's a good chance Ferrari will be a lot closer.
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Bernie Ecclestone thinks they have made the sport boring, and many fans would agree with him, but there's little reason to suspect Mercedes will be anything other than the team to beat in 2016 as well. Since the Australian Grand Prix of that year, they've won 84.2 percent of the races, taken 94.7 percent of the pole positions and scored 1404 out of a possible 1684 points. Mercedes have dominated F1 since the start of 2014. So here are five very early predictions for how the 2016 season will go. But we did some at this stage last year and - one glaring anomaly aside -they turned out to be fairly accurate. Predictions are a tricky business at the best of times, and doubly so when they are made without seeing the cars on the track. Mercedes-powered Manor will be aiming for their best season to date, Renault will want to return with a bang and McLaren, after a dreadful 2015, cannot possibly spend another year at the back of the field.
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Red Bull will need a little more luck to be able to do the same -and may find themselves in an embarrassing situation in the early rounds of the year. Evidence from 2015 suggests Mercedes will once again be at the head of the field, though maybe not in a class of their own.įerrari made huge strides last winter, and another good off-season will give the Scuderia a real chance of taking the fight to the Silver Arrows. Those two, four-day tests at the Circuit de Catalunya will give us our first solid ideas of who will be competitive in the season ahead, but some clues are already available. The 2016 F1 season kicks off with first practice for the Australian Grand Prix on March 18. Even pre-season testing won't be along until the end of February.
2016 f1 season predictions drivers#
It already feels like an eternity since we last saw the Formula One teams and drivers in action, and we still have a long wait ahead of us before we'll see them again.