Azerbaijan GP – AUSmotive.com

F1 reveals bumper 21-race calendar for 2016

For the second year running the FIA has released a Formula 1 calendar with 21 races. Like last year, it remains to be seen if we’ll actually see all of those races take place.

As it stands the 2016 season is set to kick off in Australia on 3 April, with the Chinese Grand Prix to take place the following weekend.

Increasing the demand on the teams there will be another five back-to-back race weekends including: Bahrain and Russia, Britain and Austria, Germany and Hungary, Singapore and Malaysia, and USA and Mexico.

As you will see the German Grand Prix is back and is scheduled to be held at Hockenheim. Malaysia moves from its early season slot to the latter half of the year straight after the Singapore Grand Prix.

Finally, the Azerbaijan Grand Prix will make its debut in 2016 on 17 July, to be held on a 6km street circuit in the country’s capital Baku.

The full calendar is shown below.

Another new grand prix looks set to join the F1 calendar with Bernie Ecclestone confirming to Forbes.com he has done a deal for a race to be hosted in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, in 2016.

At the behest of Ferrari, McLaren and Red Bull there is a 20-race limit on the F1 season and in order to make space for Azerbaijan that limit may need to be increased or an existing grand prix will have to get scrapped.

There’s 19 races on the calendar this year and the return of the Mexico City as a grand prix host will take us back to 20 races in 2015. There was supposed to be 20 races in the current season too, but the second failure of the Grand Prix of America in New Jersey left the door open for Mexico.

And on the New Jersey race Eccelstone has had this to say: “Somebody said to me the other day that New Jersey seem to have got their act together now and that they have got the money and are all in good shape. Whether or not that is true I donâ€™t know. The soonest it could come on the calendar is 2016.”

[Source: Forbes | Pic: Red Bull/Getty Images]