Off the top of my head, it goes like this:
- If a new manufacturer - like Honda - enters the sport, any team using their power units will be granted an extra power unit. Everyone else can only use four before taking a penalty, but newcomers will get five.
- Carry-over penalties are gone. In the past, if a driver went over their four-part quota for any if the six engine components, they got a five-place penalty. Replacing the entire engine got a ten place penalty. In a bid to stop teams from changing an entire engine when they only needed to replace one part, the FIA introduced a rule where those penalties became cumulative, and if those penalties would have moved you past the back of the grid, you had to make up the difference with a drive-through penalty at the start of the race. It was a good deterrent until Alonso and Button both got slugged with twenty-five place penalties in Austria - on a grid with twenty-two cars. That has now been scrapped, so the biggest penalty that you can take is being moved to the back of the grid.
- From Belgium, electronic driver aids will be banned at the start - the driver will have complete control over the car.
- A new points system has been introduced for superlicences - candidates must be at least eighteen years old, and have earned fifty points from placing in various feeder series to qualify. The range of eligible series was expanded beyond the traditional open-wheelers to include DTM and WTCC.
The WMSC also introduced a variety of rules for other championships.
It's radio communication that effectively tells the driver how they should be driving. Modern Formula 1 cars are extremely complex - some steering wheels have up to forty functions on them, many of them with multiple sub-menus - and so engineers frequently give drivers instructions on various settings. However, some people feel that this goes too far; for example, engineers will tell drivers how many burn-outs to do on the formation lap. From Belgium, the teams will only be able to inform drivers of changes in track conditions, incidents on the track, emergency issues with the car, and so on. If a driver wants to change settings to adapt the car, the team cannot tell them; the driver must suggest the change, and the team can only answer yes or no.
Autosport is the best place to start. F1 Fanatic is usually pretty good, but the fan community is pretty partisan - if you don't like Hamilton or Raikkonen, you probably won't be welcome. James Allen On F1 is another good source; Allen might have been insufferable as a broadcast commentator, but I think he's quite insightful as a print journalist. Adam Cooper's F1 Blog is similarly good. Will Buxton of The Buxton Blog was good for opinion pieces, but ever since he stopped commentating on GP2, it's been a bit neglected.
The ones that you should avoid are Pitpass, or any article written by Christian Sylt. Pitpass has some pretty poor-quality stuff on it (it's nicknames start with "Spitpass" and get progressively unflattering) and Sylt is Bernie Ecclestone's Minister for Propaganda. You should also avoid Joe Saward; he claims to have insight into the inner workings of the paddock and has somethinh of a cult following, but he's an arsehole - he routinely wages war on anyone who dares to criticise him, vehemently despises Force India's Vijay Mallya after Mallya dropped Tonio Liuzzi a few years ago, and insults other journalists and their followers. He and Christian Sylt can't stand one another, so if you want a good laugh, watching them battle to the death over increasingly-lower stakes is pretty funny.
It's boring, straight up. Even the commentators seems bored during live coverage.
Yup, no sign of it so far.
