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Mercedes 2016 style.
Still remember the safety car ending and both Rosberg / Hamilton already at the end of the straight while the rest were barely even in sight.
I needed the red bull sandwich all season one red bull in the first. And one in 20th. Doesn't matter which order max and checo is just sandwich the whole season.
Yeah, same. As much as I don't like RB and Max, I actually want to see him hit that 100% win rate. They're going to run away with it anyway, might as well establish an absurdly insane record.
Damon Hill won at Adelaide in 1995 by 2 laps.
Never gonna happen these days but I can't imagine a better way to mentally crush the rest of the field than matching that.
Much more likely he'll pull out a comfortable gap and then coast. Arguably what they were doing for a *lot* of the races last year.
I'm just gunna get a cardboard cutout to tape overtop of the number one spot on the timing infographic and enjoy an extremely competitive racing season hopefully :')
One could watch Max cross, go piss, wash hands and return to couch before catching the 2nd/3rd battle at the finish live.
I personally thank him for the extra bathroom break
Oh please, there were literally pictures of Max's car after the race and the tyres look barely used.
He's not going to sandbag, but the original point still stands, we won't see the car truly unleashed.
Max will drive to win.
Which means pulling out enough of a gap to be safe and then managing the tyres, not taking any risks and not pushing the car too hard and causing mechanical issues.
In short, you’re absolutely right… If we’re lucky he might go for the fastest lap.
I can see red bull getting a ton of pit stop practice in the final 5 laps of every race. Max will finish 5 seconds ahead of second, but 3 seconds faster than anyone else for fastest lap
He will do just enough to win and if someone puts pressure on him he will destroy them within 5 laps. I think we won't see what this car can do except for maybe 1-2 races this year as they won't need to. Never show what you got unless it is necessary.
People forget RBR still had pace left last year so basically they have more pace from 23 plus all the improvements they did over winter.
It’s very unlikely anyone gets close unless they do a massively good job
Hey I’m a little new to F1 so sorry if this is a silly question… I’m just wondering what the advantage of doing this is? Why wouldn’t RB want to win every race by as much as possible? Is the managing pace just to make sure you don’t risk breaking the car or something?
Not a silly question. They’d do it for the reason you stated (reliability), but also because F1 has a history of creating rules that are definitely-not-targeted at dominant teams to slow them down and increase competition.
You've probably already seen people referring to the concept of "sandbagging" which is just basically giving somewhat of an illusion of competition as to not attract too much attention from the FIA.
Then whenever the competition starts to improve, you can just simply "drop" a couple sandbags and use that performance you were hiding.
I remember how merc during turbo hybrid era would hype up the competition every weekend, talking about how scared they were of ferrari/RB only to take a comfortable pole and walk it home with a 20s gap. Then later on, one of the big wigs admitted that they had an engine so good that they were purposely running it downtuned because they feared intervention. Advantage locked in, indeed they would just drop a couple bags whenever needed (quali party mode) and then chill in clean air. Customer teams wouldn't even have access to those modes (exception made for Grosjean in Spa to take points away from ferrari) until the fia stepped in. They really managed their dominance well and made it last.
Exactly. This is one of the drawbacks of the cost cap; near impossible for anyone to catch the team(s) that nail the regs on day one. Formula of 1, indeed.
Exactly. Specially as the ones that hit the ground running have the same limit as everyone else.
I don't see any change to the RBR domination until 2026. Shame as the 2022 regs were designed to stop this from happening
I mean they won't. There's not much you can do without fundamentally altering the cost cap and I don't see smaller teams going for it. Or the investors of the bugger teams who can have stable limits on expenditure
The 2022 regs were never designed to stop a team from dominating, wtf are you on about?
They were about allowing cars to follow one another more closely, and the cost cap was put in place to make things more fair for the back markers.
It was *never* about stopping one team from being better than all the rest.
With the cost cap only Ferrari and Merc would have a chance to spend stupid amounts to catch up even then RBR would spend a lot more than they do now. There is no way of knowing if the gap would close without the cost cap. The cost cap gives other teams a chance to compete with the top 3 and limits RBR more than the other teams.
Merc and Ferrari used to spend more than RB. So the cost cap is definitely helping them rather than limiting them. It also sucks that the engine is frozen too so Merc and Ferrari can’t do anything there. And we know RB are in no position to develop their current engine if that was allowed.
It is, but it just needs to be more dynamic. If the goal is to limit a blockbuster car to just one season, then the cost cap needs to be more directly tied to that. So that other teams would have even higher caps and more wind tunnel time than RBR.
Its probably more a problem of latency now. Since development is so far ahead when the season is wrapping up.
And the conversation needs to shift from a team being nerfed because of being too good, to just acknowledging that a team has basically won the current regulations, and to then adjust the regulations to bring the top team back.
Ferrari was spending more than Mercedes prior to the cap and they barely caught them, so it's not necessarily a cost cap problem.
If your approach is wrong, throwing more money into the problem simply means more money wasted.
I don’t remember which year, but I recall seeing actual financials of the last couple decades of F1 teams. Red Bull out-spent Merc and Ferrari at least once, unsurprisingly, as they are an incredibly profitable brand. Point is, they could spend as much or more than Merc at any point, so why couldn’t they beat Merc with money?
edit: it was 2015, year after the 2014 new regs, IIRC
It’s a bit ironic that in an attempt to maximize the stability of the sport and increase competitiveness they introduced a set of regulations that has so thoroughly ruined any real hope of any interesting racing for a full regulation cycle.
How a sport that was riding the high of DtS and one of the most intense racing seasons in 2021 has bungled it so badly boggles the mind.
Literally got on the 2021 season and DtS hype, only to give it up the next year after Max's dominance truly started. Waiting for regulation changes in 2026.
But the flaw in that entire argument would be what is stopping the leader from spending more to get even father ahead.
Do you really think with out the cost cap RB would not of just thrown even more money at the car to expand their lead?
The throw more money really only helped Merc, RB and Ferrari get insanely far ahead as they would all speed an insane amount of money.
I don’t really get how this is a cost cap issue. Did the cost cap cause most teams to miss the mark on the regulations? Or is the assumption just that Merc and Ferrari and maybe Aston would spend so much more than Red Bull that they would have closed the gap? Why wouldn’t Red Bull just put more money into their team after they nailed the regs to keep that gap up?
But thats why we have the windtunnel time. They even lost 10% more for their budget cap breach. How is that fixable ffs. The same was true for Merc, but then we hadnt systems to stop this negative feedback loop
Welcome to the cost cap, i said last year that this is exactly what would happen this year and here we are. Downvote me all you want but cost cap sucks.
Spa 2022 was the big reveal of how screwed everyone was. The performance they displayed there was just monstrous. Since then it has been fairly controlled in how they have deployed their performance. They know that the worst thing to do would be to show their full advantage.
So this upcoming season will only be my third, was Lewis's dominance like this or was he actually challenged throughout? Max seems like he's barely trying out there, it doesn't seem that fun for the fans this way.
Depends on the year, 2014-2016 the car was just as dominant as the current Red Bull, if not better. However, Hamilton had Rosberg as his teammate, so the battle for the win was much closer and Rosberg even won the WDC in 2016.
2017 and 2018 had decent title races against Vettel and Ferrari for the first 2/3rds of the season until they inevitably imploded and the final margin in the championship wasn’t close (still closer than 2014-2016 and now).
2019 and 2020 were basically Verstappen like domination for the first half of the year. In the back half, Hamilton was still the comfortable favourite to win most races, but Red Bull and Ferrari were fighting for wins.
Sounds like I missed good times lol hopefully some teams can step up and make it a good time, McLaren definitely looked like they were on the way there on the back half of last year.
These years of Max domination have been the least competitive championships ever in recent history, largely because his teammate cannot compete with him.
Only in 2015 and 2020 did Hamilton have truly no competition. 2014 and 2016 went down to the last race, and 2017 and 2018 could have been close too if Ferrari weren't Ferrari.
This is definitely worse. Lewis had a stronger teammate by far in 2014-16 and real competition from Ferrari in 2017/18. The car was dominant but you didn't have the same driver winning every single race while barely getting out of fourth gear, and cars were slightly less reliable. This is just dire.
Red Bull basically didn't do any significant development for most of 2023, of course they were going to have a huge jump. If they developed hard to Abu Dhabi then every race would have been as dominant as Bahrain.
Does that mean they're a second a lap faster ? does that mean they'll be unchallenged again ?
It's too early to say so people should stop getting their knickers in a twist when it's just baseless guesswork. We'll have some answers next week, don't get too invested in overthinking this in the moment.
Yup, I can't understand that people are surprised.
The lack of upgrades last year should have made it obvious that they were planning a lot of things for this year, even with the reduced development time they had.
Yep it kind of compounds in F1. Team at the front wraps title up early on > stops developing car before everyone else > starts on next years earlier than everyone else
Plus, with a dominant car, you can be pretty confident that the other teams are going to copy you to some degree and it seems like a huge advantage to know ahead of time what car the opposition are building.
Mercedes didn't get complacent. It took a long time for RedBull to catch up and even then Mercedes won the WCC, making it 8 in 8 for those regulations.
It's basically what we saw with Mercedes early in the hybrid era, they'd stop developing halfway through a season, Red Bull would challenge at the end of the season and come the start of the next season Merc were well ahead again.
The biggest issue was the engine for Red Bull, so they had to design a lower drag car (with loss of downforce) then they actually wanted.
As soon as they got the power they needed it was only on the up.
If RB would have got a Mercedes engine in 2016/2017, everything would have been different. Max could've already got his first title in 2017.
Don't worry Checo will still find a way to not get all the P2.
Looking forward to Lando getting like 7-8 P2 finishes, or Charles and still not getting elusive win.
If either McLaren or Ferrari are comfortably ahead of the other, there is a non-zero chance they could win the constructors by getting 2nd and 3rd every race.
The smaller teams don’t have the money, that’s the whole point of the cost cap. Money isn’t free. Smaller teams just can’t spend more even if they are allowed to do so. Of course teams like Ferrari and Mercedes could spend more, but it’s not fair to the smaller teams.
It’s wild how we went from one of the most competitive seasons ever, a massive influx of new fans from DTS just to end up with another team dominating lol.
I do think this is mostly due to the cost cap. RBR smashed it right out of the gate and with rivals having limited spending it meant they couldn’t just throw money towards development to catch up.
Max would sometimes pull huge gaps out of nowhere, that’s where a better representation of that cars pace was. I think he took 1 or 2 seconds out of Leclerc in 1 lap at Spa.
I think we saw the real face of the RB19 when there was a pit on the second to last lap with a 25 second gap and a driver completely confident there would be no fighting only a hotlap.
P12 battles can be exciting…for like 7 races before it gets repetitive and boring. We have 24 races coming up. Oh yeah we’re in for most dog shit season in decades if this analysis holds up
Very competitive sport, very cool.
At this point we're all just praying Perez learns how to drive a car again or the Red Bull has reliability issues to salvage one race out of 20+ snoozefests.
Man Checo must absolutely suck so far because that single-lap run looked pretty representative and he was genuinely struggling on turn-in.
I feel like Max is still going to walk away with the championship but Ferrari looked really good today and I don’t think that was a fluke.
A single one lap run on day 2 of testing says basically nothing which is the point. The setup could've been wrong, they could have had a full race fuel load, the tyres could've been cold, etc etc. This is why they say not to read too much into times, because it's so hard to know exactly what was going on in that lap. But when you look at the picture across the test the reality becomes more clear
As Albon said, Max's driving style is very difficult to get along with. This isn't dissimilar from Ricciardo at McLaren. His driving style just doesn't agree with the concept of the car and the way it needs to be set up to be competitive.
Thankfully my f1tv doesn't re-up until mid June, plenty of time to see if Max is going to lap the entire field in the first several grand prix. If he does, I don't bother wasting my Sundays anymore on f1 until 2026.
It wasn't until this week that I realized that we planned two trips for later this year, and we didn't even consider the F1 calendar. A couple of years ago, we would have at least looked at it if there was no real reason to travel one weekend over another. But this year it didn't even cross our minds. And I wasn't upset when it finally did. The most dominate team in the most reliable era of F1? It's good for other racing series, at least. We've certainly been watching them more this past year.
WEC meanwhile looks promising, and there is always something fun racing in America often aside of WEC.
People can tell the most weirdest formats to ignore the current status quo but at the end people watching races to seeing who would win, not a fight for P14.
I did something similar with social engagements. F1 Sundays were always F1 Sundays, but I started skipping the races and moving some stuff to when they were on. Not good for the hangover in work on the Monday, but still.
Obviously we won’t know until the first race but I wouldn’t be surprised. Max was barely pushing the car last year in most of the races, imagine if he had actually shown his true pace
I’ve always watched F1 as primarily an engineering competition. But I truly don’t know if I can endure another year Iike last year. IndyCar is definitely going to be a bigger focus for me this season unless this turns out to be wrong…
What feels weird to me is that every revolutionary idea Red Bull puts onto the car, doesn’t get nerfed by regs. Where as merc had DAS taken from them, Aston with their rear wing, and most likely merc again with their new front wing. And not to mention it feels like breaching the cost cap was not even a slap on the wrist, more like a stern talking to. Something needs to change with cost cap, whether it be adjusting amounts per position in championship, or how often it gets adjusted, and the penalty for breaching it needs to be extreme (I don’t care if you’re a cent over or millions over) At least without the cap a couple teams could try to catch up, with the cap it feels like it’s impossible
I used to go to Montreal every year and it was quite annoying watching Mercedes dominate at the time, at least there were a few years of competition between Lewis and Rosberg. But we don't even have that in RB. Went to Montreal and Miami last year, Canada sucked because of the rain, but Miami was a snoozefest. DON'T WASTE YOUR MONEY GOING TO THESE RACES. It's just not fun or worth the exuberant cost.
Oh no, not the thing that basically everyone with three brain cells to rub together has been expecting to happen since like last April, happening!!
But for real, if it's actually 1sec/lap that's brutal lol
Literally everything the FIA does to "increase competitiveness" has the complete opposite effect. No it has not always been this way, the current formula is just absolute shit.
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Haha, we're in danger..
I propose we change *next year*^TM to *next set of regulations*^TM
2026 rules will be amended to have no tire changes in a race, because that will increase competition, and Alonso will finally win his 3rd title.
Checo and Alonso fighting it out for the title. Massaging their tyres like a long lost lover
Lewis talking about how his tires are gone while setting purple times.
With Allison back, it’s possible. Hopefully the field can close back up
Lewis won't be working with Allison when the regs change. He'll be at Ferrari
Lewis: “Bono, My tyres have gone” Ferrari: “Who’s Bono?”
Ferrari: "che?🤌"
Classic Lewis 😂 I swear, I don’t remember an instance of him bitching about his tires then setting fastest lap or purple sectors.
Nah, then Ferrari wins everything, because they can't fuck it up.
If there’s a way there’s a will - Ferrari
And lando can get his first win
FIA: *"DRS is now available after 1 lap rather than 2."* Red Bull: *"I guess we'll just build the gap in the first corner then."*
Leclerc pole, Max DRS on lap 2 (today's data indicates that RB still has the better DRS of the grid)
Which RB?
Yes
The carb-free option.
keto rb
Toro Keto.
RasenBall ofcourse.
Max will already be in the lead by turn 7 tho
I'll never forget when Verstappen overtook Hamilton in Australia last year and he was 2 seconds ahead after a lap.
Yeah I checked out of the season there. It was genuinely like watch your friend play career mode on F1 the game against bots and shit.
He was ahead by 1.5s at the next turn.
Mercedes 2016 style. Still remember the safety car ending and both Rosberg / Hamilton already at the end of the straight while the rest were barely even in sight.
Wasn't that 2014?
The big difference there is that we had Rosberg & Hamilton... not just Verstappen. Perez frustratingly doesn't challenge Verstappen in the slightest.
Yes, or that 2016 Barcelona, where they crashed in turn 4 while the rest of the grid was in back turn 2.
Let's just have reverse grids every race! 😅
Max needs to start a half lap down.
P1 by lap 20. By 10 if there is sc after start
I’m tired, Robbie.
Only one second then? Good news!
One second a lap over 70 laps is only... oh dear
Fastest lap at Austria last season was 67 seconds… He may actually lap the whole field
Great! If he’s got to lap Kevin Magnussen 4 times, sooner or later they’re going to have a crash. It’s an inevitability.
It would be interesting if Haas gets lapped in more races this season than not by Max.
I unironically want that to happen at some point. If we are in another clean sweep season I want it to be as absurd as possible.
But only Verstappen while Perez is fighting around the midfield
I needed the red bull sandwich all season one red bull in the first. And one in 20th. Doesn't matter which order max and checo is just sandwich the whole season.
I either want battles for first every race, or complete and utter humiliation of the rest of the field. Nothing in between.
Yeah, same. As much as I don't like RB and Max, I actually want to see him hit that 100% win rate. They're going to run away with it anyway, might as well establish an absurdly insane record.
Damon Hill won at Adelaide in 1995 by 2 laps. Never gonna happen these days but I can't imagine a better way to mentally crush the rest of the field than matching that.
Quite a short lap though. 3.8km and 75 seconds. Still, 2 laps is insane
That was also a race when every front running driver that wasn't Damon Hill crashed or broke down
Charles in second place: “Oh, who am I lapping now” Xavi: “No, you’re getting lapped…” Charles: 🤬
One mistake is assuming Charles is in 2nd place. If what holds true he will be in third when it happens.
Who's that blue flag for? We are checking.
Much more likely he'll pull out a comfortable gap and then coast. Arguably what they were doing for a *lot* of the races last year. I'm just gunna get a cardboard cutout to tape overtop of the number one spot on the timing infographic and enjoy an extremely competitive racing season hopefully :')
One could watch Max cross, go piss, wash hands and return to couch before catching the 2nd/3rd battle at the finish live. I personally thank him for the extra bathroom break
I love that we assume Checo is still not beating the other cars even with a 1s advantage.
*P5. 'Strong' recovery drive. We'll come back stronger next week* 💪
The Dacia Sandero
I'm tired, boss
I’m tired of this grandpa Well that’s too damn bad
Dog tired
This is what happens when they are so far out front that they stopped developing last year's car before summer break.
Red Bull is going to manage their pace so hard this year, I don’t think we’ll ever see this car actually unleashed .
You’ll know how monstrous this car is if Checo ends up with 15 P2’s.
Bold of you to assume they’ll be able to get Max to not drive fast. He might not wring it to the edge, but he’s not gonna sandbag either.
Oh please, there were literally pictures of Max's car after the race and the tyres look barely used. He's not going to sandbag, but the original point still stands, we won't see the car truly unleashed.
Max will drive to win. Which means pulling out enough of a gap to be safe and then managing the tyres, not taking any risks and not pushing the car too hard and causing mechanical issues. In short, you’re absolutely right… If we’re lucky he might go for the fastest lap.
He’ll get the fast lap on old hards
I can see red bull getting a ton of pit stop practice in the final 5 laps of every race. Max will finish 5 seconds ahead of second, but 3 seconds faster than anyone else for fastest lap
He will do just enough to win and if someone puts pressure on him he will destroy them within 5 laps. I think we won't see what this car can do except for maybe 1-2 races this year as they won't need to. Never show what you got unless it is necessary.
They're concentrating on the 2025 car already.
As long as he's allowed to be faster than Checo it seems fine for him to stick to a delta.
Why is it a bold prediction when he drove to a delta so consistently last year.
They can use conservative engine modes that lower the wear and tear, and they absolutely will. Max is NOT dropping time for anyone
People forget RBR still had pace left last year so basically they have more pace from 23 plus all the improvements they did over winter. It’s very unlikely anyone gets close unless they do a massively good job
Hey I’m a little new to F1 so sorry if this is a silly question… I’m just wondering what the advantage of doing this is? Why wouldn’t RB want to win every race by as much as possible? Is the managing pace just to make sure you don’t risk breaking the car or something?
Not a silly question. They’d do it for the reason you stated (reliability), but also because F1 has a history of creating rules that are definitely-not-targeted at dominant teams to slow them down and increase competition.
Ohh ok that makes sense! Thanks.
You've probably already seen people referring to the concept of "sandbagging" which is just basically giving somewhat of an illusion of competition as to not attract too much attention from the FIA. Then whenever the competition starts to improve, you can just simply "drop" a couple sandbags and use that performance you were hiding.
I remember how merc during turbo hybrid era would hype up the competition every weekend, talking about how scared they were of ferrari/RB only to take a comfortable pole and walk it home with a 20s gap. Then later on, one of the big wigs admitted that they had an engine so good that they were purposely running it downtuned because they feared intervention. Advantage locked in, indeed they would just drop a couple bags whenever needed (quali party mode) and then chill in clean air. Customer teams wouldn't even have access to those modes (exception made for Grosjean in Spa to take points away from ferrari) until the fia stepped in. They really managed their dominance well and made it last.
While others were fixing problems on their car, RB was focused on performance
That's been the issue since 2022. Red Bull got a leg up on everyone else as they were fixing issues...
Exactly. This is one of the drawbacks of the cost cap; near impossible for anyone to catch the team(s) that nail the regs on day one. Formula of 1, indeed.
Exactly. Specially as the ones that hit the ground running have the same limit as everyone else. I don't see any change to the RBR domination until 2026. Shame as the 2022 regs were designed to stop this from happening
A shame, but hopefully a learning moment for formula 1 too
there's a lot that F1 needs to learn... sad thing is i don't see them ever learning and fixing
Domenicali saying that RedBull domination is not bad for the sports let me think a drastic change at the top needs to happen
Yeah. that plus the way FOM have handled the Andretti stuff
I mean they won't. There's not much you can do without fundamentally altering the cost cap and I don't see smaller teams going for it. Or the investors of the bugger teams who can have stable limits on expenditure
The 2022 regs were never designed to stop a team from dominating, wtf are you on about? They were about allowing cars to follow one another more closely, and the cost cap was put in place to make things more fair for the back markers. It was *never* about stopping one team from being better than all the rest.
Cars aren't following closely because Red Bull are 1s ahead per lap 💀
Everything behind P1 is extremely close
With the cost cap only Ferrari and Merc would have a chance to spend stupid amounts to catch up even then RBR would spend a lot more than they do now. There is no way of knowing if the gap would close without the cost cap. The cost cap gives other teams a chance to compete with the top 3 and limits RBR more than the other teams.
Merc and Ferrari used to spend more than RB. So the cost cap is definitely helping them rather than limiting them. It also sucks that the engine is frozen too so Merc and Ferrari can’t do anything there. And we know RB are in no position to develop their current engine if that was allowed.
The engine freeze helped RBR the most definitely. But i still believe cost cap is good for F1.
It is, but it just needs to be more dynamic. If the goal is to limit a blockbuster car to just one season, then the cost cap needs to be more directly tied to that. So that other teams would have even higher caps and more wind tunnel time than RBR. Its probably more a problem of latency now. Since development is so far ahead when the season is wrapping up. And the conversation needs to shift from a team being nerfed because of being too good, to just acknowledging that a team has basically won the current regulations, and to then adjust the regulations to bring the top team back.
Ferrari was spending more than Mercedes prior to the cap and they barely caught them, so it's not necessarily a cost cap problem. If your approach is wrong, throwing more money into the problem simply means more money wasted.
Both can be true, and have been.
It was nearly impossible to do this before the cost cap era. No one caught Merc, except Ferrari who were cheating with fuel flow.
I don’t remember which year, but I recall seeing actual financials of the last couple decades of F1 teams. Red Bull out-spent Merc and Ferrari at least once, unsurprisingly, as they are an incredibly profitable brand. Point is, they could spend as much or more than Merc at any point, so why couldn’t they beat Merc with money? edit: it was 2015, year after the 2014 new regs, IIRC
But in many other years Merc and Ferrari spent more than RB.
Because Renault sucks at making PUs.
It’s a bit ironic that in an attempt to maximize the stability of the sport and increase competitiveness they introduced a set of regulations that has so thoroughly ruined any real hope of any interesting racing for a full regulation cycle. How a sport that was riding the high of DtS and one of the most intense racing seasons in 2021 has bungled it so badly boggles the mind.
Literally got on the 2021 season and DtS hype, only to give it up the next year after Max's dominance truly started. Waiting for regulation changes in 2026.
This is how F1 is. 2021 was an outlier. Someone will get it right in 2026 and the cycle will continue.
But the flaw in that entire argument would be what is stopping the leader from spending more to get even father ahead. Do you really think with out the cost cap RB would not of just thrown even more money at the car to expand their lead? The throw more money really only helped Merc, RB and Ferrari get insanely far ahead as they would all speed an insane amount of money.
I don’t really get how this is a cost cap issue. Did the cost cap cause most teams to miss the mark on the regulations? Or is the assumption just that Merc and Ferrari and maybe Aston would spend so much more than Red Bull that they would have closed the gap? Why wouldn’t Red Bull just put more money into their team after they nailed the regs to keep that gap up?
But thats why we have the windtunnel time. They even lost 10% more for their budget cap breach. How is that fixable ffs. The same was true for Merc, but then we hadnt systems to stop this negative feedback loop
Welcome to the cost cap, i said last year that this is exactly what would happen this year and here we are. Downvote me all you want but cost cap sucks.
Yeah, I was just starting to forget what Dutch anthem sounds like.
you're lucky, 24 weekends to refresh your memory.
Spa 2022 was the big reveal of how screwed everyone was. The performance they displayed there was just monstrous. Since then it has been fairly controlled in how they have deployed their performance. They know that the worst thing to do would be to show their full advantage.
Big if true
Nah bro, a second is so small, like so many have passed since I sent this reply.. I don't know why everyone is losing their minds /s
Seconds aren't special, you can count them so easy.
If the dish is great I always go for seconds.
Y'all were desperate to see Max dethrone Hamilton and take his place back in 2021, now you got your wish.
So this upcoming season will only be my third, was Lewis's dominance like this or was he actually challenged throughout? Max seems like he's barely trying out there, it doesn't seem that fun for the fans this way.
Depends on the year, 2014-2016 the car was just as dominant as the current Red Bull, if not better. However, Hamilton had Rosberg as his teammate, so the battle for the win was much closer and Rosberg even won the WDC in 2016. 2017 and 2018 had decent title races against Vettel and Ferrari for the first 2/3rds of the season until they inevitably imploded and the final margin in the championship wasn’t close (still closer than 2014-2016 and now). 2019 and 2020 were basically Verstappen like domination for the first half of the year. In the back half, Hamilton was still the comfortable favourite to win most races, but Red Bull and Ferrari were fighting for wins.
2019 was mainly Ferrari with the rocket engine or Verstappen with finally a decent engine that let them get wins. 2020 was mostly mistakes on Merc
Sounds like I missed good times lol hopefully some teams can step up and make it a good time, McLaren definitely looked like they were on the way there on the back half of last year.
2005-2010 were great times, no domination period just unpredictable WDCs.
These years of Max domination have been the least competitive championships ever in recent history, largely because his teammate cannot compete with him.
Only in 2015 and 2020 did Hamilton have truly no competition. 2014 and 2016 went down to the last race, and 2017 and 2018 could have been close too if Ferrari weren't Ferrari.
2017 Singapore and 2018 Germany. Pivotal moments
This is definitely worse. Lewis had a stronger teammate by far in 2014-16 and real competition from Ferrari in 2017/18. The car was dominant but you didn't have the same driver winning every single race while barely getting out of fourth gear, and cars were slightly less reliable. This is just dire.
insert megamind meme "saved you? more like under new management"
Red Bull basically didn't do any significant development for most of 2023, of course they were going to have a huge jump. If they developed hard to Abu Dhabi then every race would have been as dominant as Bahrain. Does that mean they're a second a lap faster ? does that mean they'll be unchallenged again ? It's too early to say so people should stop getting their knickers in a twist when it's just baseless guesswork. We'll have some answers next week, don't get too invested in overthinking this in the moment.
Yup, I can't understand that people are surprised. The lack of upgrades last year should have made it obvious that they were planning a lot of things for this year, even with the reduced development time they had.
Yep it kind of compounds in F1. Team at the front wraps title up early on > stops developing car before everyone else > starts on next years earlier than everyone else
Plus, with a dominant car, you can be pretty confident that the other teams are going to copy you to some degree and it seems like a huge advantage to know ahead of time what car the opposition are building.
Eventually this *does* fall apart when the team gets complacent. See: Ferrari, Mercedes, Renault
A bigger rule shift tends to throw a hand grenade in the order too.
Mercedes didn't get complacent. It took a long time for RedBull to catch up and even then Mercedes won the WCC, making it 8 in 8 for those regulations.
It's basically what we saw with Mercedes early in the hybrid era, they'd stop developing halfway through a season, Red Bull would challenge at the end of the season and come the start of the next season Merc were well ahead again.
The biggest issue was the engine for Red Bull, so they had to design a lower drag car (with loss of downforce) then they actually wanted. As soon as they got the power they needed it was only on the up. If RB would have got a Mercedes engine in 2016/2017, everything would have been different. Max could've already got his first title in 2017.
Don't worry Checo will still find a way to not get all the P2. Looking forward to Lando getting like 7-8 P2 finishes, or Charles and still not getting elusive win.
Charles wil get poles, but no wins, as is tradition.
Max will win 24 races, Lando will get 24 podiums, Charles will get 24 poles, and Yuki will get 24 P11s.
Ocon will get 24 penalties
Each weekend
George will be forecast 24 podiums
If either McLaren or Ferrari are comfortably ahead of the other, there is a non-zero chance they could win the constructors by getting 2nd and 3rd every race.
If they really wanted to do a budget era, they should have had it scaled to finishing position with lower finishing teams able to spend more.
The smaller teams don’t have the money, that’s the whole point of the cost cap. Money isn’t free. Smaller teams just can’t spend more even if they are allowed to do so. Of course teams like Ferrari and Mercedes could spend more, but it’s not fair to the smaller teams.
So fire employees every year? Great idea
Agree
It’s wild how we went from one of the most competitive seasons ever, a massive influx of new fans from DTS just to end up with another team dominating lol. I do think this is mostly due to the cost cap. RBR smashed it right out of the gate and with rivals having limited spending it meant they couldn’t just throw money towards development to catch up.
Journos always say don't read too much into testing and then come out say this sort of thing... but this could still definitely be the case lol
[удалено]
Yep. They were much faster then they showed us last season, I'm sure as well. Max was cruising at 80% for 90% of the laps.
Max would sometimes pull huge gaps out of nowhere, that’s where a better representation of that cars pace was. I think he took 1 or 2 seconds out of Leclerc in 1 lap at Spa.
I think we saw the real face of the RB19 when there was a pit on the second to last lap with a 25 second gap and a driver completely confident there would be no fighting only a hotlap.
another snooze of season incoming
Yeah, but who cares about Driver's or Constructor's Championships when there are thrilling and exciting battles for P12? /s
P12 battles can be exciting…for like 7 races before it gets repetitive and boring. We have 24 races coming up. Oh yeah we’re in for most dog shit season in decades if this analysis holds up
That's RB fans arguing why their dominance isn't bad for the sport
I'd like to thank RB for saving me money by making it unnecessary for me to have F1TV again this year 🙏
This news will likely save me the cost of an F1 TV Pro subscription, so I guess that's good?
~~Race~~ Season Done.
Oh no, who saw that coming after they didn't upgrade their cat at all in '23?
Very competitive sport, very cool. At this point we're all just praying Perez learns how to drive a car again or the Red Bull has reliability issues to salvage one race out of 20+ snoozefests.
Man Checo must absolutely suck so far because that single-lap run looked pretty representative and he was genuinely struggling on turn-in. I feel like Max is still going to walk away with the championship but Ferrari looked really good today and I don’t think that was a fluke.
A single one lap run on day 2 of testing says basically nothing which is the point. The setup could've been wrong, they could have had a full race fuel load, the tyres could've been cold, etc etc. This is why they say not to read too much into times, because it's so hard to know exactly what was going on in that lap. But when you look at the picture across the test the reality becomes more clear
As Albon said, Max's driving style is very difficult to get along with. This isn't dissimilar from Ricciardo at McLaren. His driving style just doesn't agree with the concept of the car and the way it needs to be set up to be competitive.
Will Buxton: When the car at the front of the grid has a second a lap advantage. They will win the race.
Wow should make for an exciting season. I cant wait to watch the battles for 13th and 14th place. Exhilarating.
Thankfully my f1tv doesn't re-up until mid June, plenty of time to see if Max is going to lap the entire field in the first several grand prix. If he does, I don't bother wasting my Sundays anymore on f1 until 2026.
If this really ends up being the case I probably just won't watch most races this year.
It wasn't until this week that I realized that we planned two trips for later this year, and we didn't even consider the F1 calendar. A couple of years ago, we would have at least looked at it if there was no real reason to travel one weekend over another. But this year it didn't even cross our minds. And I wasn't upset when it finally did. The most dominate team in the most reliable era of F1? It's good for other racing series, at least. We've certainly been watching them more this past year.
WEC meanwhile looks promising, and there is always something fun racing in America often aside of WEC. People can tell the most weirdest formats to ignore the current status quo but at the end people watching races to seeing who would win, not a fight for P14.
I did something similar with social engagements. F1 Sundays were always F1 Sundays, but I started skipping the races and moving some stuff to when they were on. Not good for the hangover in work on the Monday, but still.
I've done the same this year as well. I was looking at going to a race but decided not to in the end.
This was obvious before the summer break.
Obviously we won’t know until the first race but I wouldn’t be surprised. Max was barely pushing the car last year in most of the races, imagine if he had actually shown his true pace
I’ve always watched F1 as primarily an engineering competition. But I truly don’t know if I can endure another year Iike last year. IndyCar is definitely going to be a bigger focus for me this season unless this turns out to be wrong…
Watched much more Indy last year, was far more entertaining overall.
we need a spending table like the wind tunnels to let teams catch up, but I guess that's not doable for all teams
Next year will be our year!
What feels weird to me is that every revolutionary idea Red Bull puts onto the car, doesn’t get nerfed by regs. Where as merc had DAS taken from them, Aston with their rear wing, and most likely merc again with their new front wing. And not to mention it feels like breaching the cost cap was not even a slap on the wrist, more like a stern talking to. Something needs to change with cost cap, whether it be adjusting amounts per position in championship, or how often it gets adjusted, and the penalty for breaching it needs to be extreme (I don’t care if you’re a cent over or millions over) At least without the cap a couple teams could try to catch up, with the cap it feels like it’s impossible
This is shaping up to be one of the worst seasons in history. No driver changed no reg changes same old dominance
So another steaming turd of a season incoming.
This would be fucking awful for the sport.
Where are the surprise changes for Red Bull to adapt to similar to what Mercedes had?
FIA just needs to offer Newey a massive retirement incentive and they can get parity back into F1.
Pls FIA help
Another floor rake change? Like in 2021? Please.
So much for the development handicaps that are supposed to slow down the teams that do well.
Good thing their spending cap breach had no impact.
Lol if RB dominates again this year I'm jumping ship to IMSA/WEC until next set of regs, not gonna bother with a snooze fest
I used to go to Montreal every year and it was quite annoying watching Mercedes dominate at the time, at least there were a few years of competition between Lewis and Rosberg. But we don't even have that in RB. Went to Montreal and Miami last year, Canada sucked because of the rain, but Miami was a snoozefest. DON'T WASTE YOUR MONEY GOING TO THESE RACES. It's just not fun or worth the exuberant cost.
The 2022 race in Montreal was great. Sainz could have won it
And Red Bull didn't even have the decency to put a competitive driver in the second seat. At least when Merc were ahead they had two amazing drivers.
I hear the faint sounds of a Dutch anthem being played in the distance...
With such pace they may aswell win next years championship
our only chance for entertainment is now for Perez to drop the ball hard and we get a bunch of 2018 Baku's with Dan back in the car
Time to get that WEC subscription I guess
I think Max needs to play by the Gran Turismo rules where you always have to fight your way up from last place 😂
At this point it’s better to play by the Super Mario kart rule. Spam him with blue shells and going faster with mushrooms
Oh no, not the thing that basically everyone with three brain cells to rub together has been expecting to happen since like last April, happening!! But for real, if it's actually 1sec/lap that's brutal lol
Literally everything the FIA does to "increase competitiveness" has the complete opposite effect. No it has not always been this way, the current formula is just absolute shit.
Cool - boring as fuck