Unexpected, challenging, good, disappointing, resilience, rad, brilliant, enjoying, average, excellent, rollercoaster, exciting, fun, improvement, exceptional, long, awesome. The 2016 Formula 1 season was all this and more according to its own participants.
Nico Rosberg took the driver’s title at the end of the longest season in the sport’s history. He managed to beat his teammate Lewis Hamilton in a fierce duel, which dominated F1 in 2016. Their Mercedes team triumphed for the third time in a row in the constructor’s championship.
A new star was born – Max Verstappen grabbed people’s imagination with his daring, bold, excessively aggressive according to some driving style. Formula 1 legend and triple world champion Jackie Stewart thinks the young Red Bull driver is Grand prix’s almost only hope right now.
“Other than Verstappen’s breakthrough, it was not a very interesting season”
“Verstappen reminds me of the first races of Mario Andretti, Jochen Rindt and Francois Cevert. They managed to shake things up”, the Scot told Swiss newspaper Blick.
“Lewis Hamilton is a kind of modern hero, [Sebastian] Vettel is a quiet hero. And [Kimi] Raikkonen is perhaps even more popular than those two, although he barely says anything. Or perhaps he’s popular precisely because of it!”
“F1 is missing excitement, incidents, failures and accidents. Don’t get me wrong, nobody wants to see a driver crash but you want some excitement. In my day that was the case, but unfortunately many of my rivals paid the ultimate price for that.”
2017 will mark the beginning of a new era with new cars in Formula 1. But before that the Grand prix world waits to learn the name of Nico Rosberg’s successor. The 2016 world champion announced his retirement from F1 only five days after winning the crown. Nico explained that he has achieved the ultimate goal and will focus on other things. Valteri Bottas and Pascal Wehrlein are favorites for his place in the Mercedes team. The world will learn who will take it after the New Year and it might even take longer.
