Auto GP season 2016
The 2016 Auto GP season was the 17th and so far last season of the European racing series, which was held for the first time as the Italian Formula 3000 Championship in 1999 and has been known as Auto GP since 2010 . The course of the season was marked by restructuring and upheaval. Initially, the season was held as an independent racing series. However, after the starting field was very weak at the opening race - as in the previous year - the organizer gave up the independent implementation of the series. The teams and drivers started in the Boss GP series since July 2016 , within which the AutoGP formed its own class.
background
The AutoGP series is organized by the Italian company Paolo Coloni Racing ; are responsible Paolo Coloni and his father Enzo . In 2014 , the series still had a full starting field with 18 drivers and a racing calendar consisting of 16 races with events in Europe and North Africa. In the following year , the field shrank to five teams and seven drivers. After only two races, Coloni ended the championship prematurely.
A new edition for 2016 was initially questionable. Coloni changed the regulations in the autumn of 2015 in the interest of opening up. In contrast to previous years, all monoposti with a displacement of 2.0 to 4.0 liters were allowed to start in 2016 .
For the 2016 season, seven race weekends were initially planned, each with two races, which were to be driven exclusively on Italian tracks. At the opening race on 7./8. May 2016 at the Adria International Raceway only seven drivers took part. Coloni canceled some of the planned races and set new runs that deviated from the original calendar; In the end, however, they were not carried out. From July 2016, the Auto GP drivers started instead in the Boss GP series and complemented the field there. There were no longer any independent auto GP races. However, Coloni made an independent rating for the remaining Auto-GP drivers. In total, the 2016 season consisted of 10 races that were held over five weekends. After the last race of the Boss GP series, a final race of the AutoGP was initially planned; this run, for which there was never any specific information about the venue, did not take place.
Regulations
In contrast to previous years, all monoposti with a displacement of 2.0 to 4.0 liters are eligible to start in 2016 . All pilots drive with a chassis from Lola and engines from Zytek or Gibson. With the exception of Armando Mangini, who drove an old Lola B02 / 50 , all drivers started with vehicles of the B05 / 52 type .
Teams and drivers
At the end of 2015, seven teams had registered for the 2016 Auto GP season. Three of them did not compete at the beginning of the season, so that four teams with a total of seven drivers started the first race in May 2016. In the course of the season the starting field was reduced to four teams with one driver each. The PS Racing team is operated by Coloni.
The youngest driver is Mahaveer Raghunathan , who was 17 at the start of the season , and Armando Mangini, who was born in 1947, is the oldest . Salvatore de Plano only took part in free practice in the first race of the season. He did not contest qualifying or the races.
| team | No. | driver | Race weekend |
|---|---|---|---|
 Zele Racing
|
7th |
 Luís Sá Silva
|
1-2 |
| 8th |
 Dominik Fekete
|
1-2 | |
| 9 |
Zoltan Fekete
|
1-2 | |
| 444 |
Philipp Sager
|
9-10 | |
| 789 |
 Christof von Grünigen
|
3-10 | |
 PS Racing
|
15 115 |
 Mahaveer Raghunathan
|
1-10 |
| 15 115 |
Emanuele Romani
|
9-10 | |
| 16 |
Salvatore de Plano
|
1-2 | |
|
MM International Motorsport
|
32 |
Armando Mangini
|
1-2 |
|
Torino Squadra Corse
|
55 155 |
 Luis Michael Dörrbecker
|
1-10 |
Race calendar and course of the season
The racing calendar for the 2016 season presented in November 2015 comprised six racing weekends with two races each. In fact, there was only one independent Auto GP race in the 2016 season, the opening race on 7/8. May 2016 at the Adria International Raceway . Four teams with a total of seven drivers took part in it.
Coloni then changed the calendar several times. The original dates were partially postponed, other races were canceled completely. A race planned for July 23rd and 24th at the Sicilian Autodromo di Pergusa was canceled in May 2016. Instead, Coloni took for the weekend of 18./19. June 2016 a race on the Nürburgring in the program, which in turn was canceled in advance on June 16, 2016. A Spanish source gives the reason for "noise violations" ("exceso de ruido"). The organizers of the series made no statement on this. In the reporting there are speculations that the cancellation was actually due to a field that was too small.
Web links
References and comments
- ↑ Press release of February 5, 2016 (accessed June 23, 2016).
- ↑ Cancelan la carrera de Nürburgring de Auto GP por exceso de ruido. Escudería Telmex, June 16, 2016, accessed June 23, 2016 .
- ↑ Only two AutoGP drivers took part in the second round of the race in Brno. Von Grünigen and Mangani were not qualified for this run.
- ↑ The racing calendar published in October 2015 provides for two final races, at which the time and location have not yet been announced. S. Modified race calendar 2016 www.autogp.net on the website
