Stop undermining achievement in F1

When teams dominate, as Mercedes does today and Red Bull did before, everything looks so easy to the point where they get little credit. So much so that often the team excelling is the victim of criticism.

After all, Mercedes has had a car with a clear performance advantage so pronounced over the past 29 races, that it's easy for astonishment at the quintet it didn't win to override respect for how much it has achieved.

To recognise just how difficult it is to create this kind of domination, you need only look down the grid to see how the mighty are fallen.

Until Daniil Kvyat and Daniel Ricciardo took second and third in the chaotic Hungarian Grand Prix, Red Bull was on target for its first podium-less season since its debut campaign with what amounted to little more than a cut-and-shut Jaguar in 2005.

Even further down the grid, despite Fernando Alonso's fortuitous fifth place at the Hungaroring, McLaren has only been saved from serial back-of-the grid ignominy by the presence of the Manor team, which is a continuation outfit in survival mode with no serious aspirations of climbing the grid this year.

With the exception of Manor, every single team on the grid has won races in one form or another, while six have won championships. Yet only two have won a race this season.

You could conclude that this just means F1 is a cyclical thing, that a strong team can rise or fall based purely on external factors rather than being the master of its own destiny. It's almost luck of the draw.

But it isn't. Let's consider for a moment the ingredients and the lead times involved in hitting the front of the grand prix grid.

Mercedes purchased title-winning Brawn team in 2009 © LAT

In the case of Mercedes, the story started in 2009 when the championship-winning Brawn team was acquired and rebranded as the first works entry by the German manufacturer since 1955.

At the time, talk was of having bought a turn-key title-winning operation. But the reality was different. Huge sums of money, including a sizeable chunk of the 2008 season budget, had been poured into what became the 2009 Brawn by Honda, the previous owner of the team.

Brawn had to cut back dramatically and muddle through the season with an operation that was too big to be sustained even on the generous terms given to the new owners by Honda.

A rapid reduction in size is, by its nature, damaging and Mercedes actually acquired a team that required a great deal of work to redevelop. The facilities at Brackley were very good, but combined with frustrations about not being able to operate as leanly as hoped in a resource-restriction agreement-governed (or not) era it was never going to be as simple as some assumed.

But from there, what did it take for Mercedes to hit the front? It took recruitment, restructuring, investment, the introduction of a new rules package to create the opportunity.

And that, too, did not happen by chance. Ferrari has admitted it started work on its 2014 engine far too late. Mercedes, meanwhile, apparently started single-cylinder concept work on this kind of engine four years before the 1.6-litre turbocharged V6s were introduced, and before the final rules had even been ratified.

The team itself also required a new structure. The idea of too many technical directors, which led to derision at the time, was always spurious. Ross Brawn, Bob Bell, Aldo Costa and Geoff Willis had all held such roles but the question is how they were slotted into the structure.

With the major changes coming, it allowed Willis to do early work on the 2014 car with Costa then playing the central role, all under the auspices of Bell. Paddy Lowe was recruited, Lewis Hamilton was sold on the idea of joining a team that promised much, but delivered little from 2010-2012, and Toto Wolff joined to run the team.

Lauda, Wolff and Lowe were among those to join the team © XPB

Against that backdrop, Mercedes was convinced to up its investment, with Niki Lauda taking on a role (having proved to be integral to Hamilton's recruitment).

And that is just a brief overview of the "big ticket" changes. Running a racing team is not just about a few key decisions and some big name changes. Going back to the moment Mercedes took over Brawn, just think about how many choices have been made to become a title-winning team.

The number is incalculable. Millions, billions of decisions that, on their own, mean little but collectively add up to a performance advantage of a tenth-of-a-second, three-tenths of a second, half-a-second, a second.

While that situation holds, it's a time of plenty for any team. Make no mistakes, if history tells us one thing it is that empires will fall and Mercedes will not continue to win forever. Like Red Bull before it, McLaren, Ferrari and Williams before that, and going back further (original) Lotus and Tyrrell, plenty of giants have proved that if getting to the top is hard, staying there indefinitely is impossible.

Then comes a time for rebuilding. The rules change, the landscape changes, drivers change, engines change, senior personnel come and go, and different factors become more significant in the overall competitive equation than they did before. And most of these changes are difficult to anticipate.

That is why it is relatively rare for two teams to be at the top of their game at similar times. In recent seasons, there have been few times where two rival cars have been on anything approaching level pegging.

The 2012 season started chaotically, but ultimately Red Bull had the strongest package. So you have to go back to 2010, when Red Bull, Ferrari and (until a late-season drop-off) McLaren faded in and out of competitiveness.

Even in that season, Red Bull's relative immaturity as a team led to errors that shrouded the fact it had a car capable of wrapping things up far earlier than it did.

It's become rare for two teams to fight together at the front © XPB

A year earlier, Brawn dominated early on, the consequence of the exceptional circumstances mentioned above, before Red Bull hit form. So, realistically, you have to go back to 2007 and 2008 and a pair of great Ferrari v McLaren dust-ups for the last occasion we had two consecutive seasons where two teams duked it out.

There's a misconception that decisions taken now will bear instant fruit in F1 teams. But the lead times involved are enormous. Just look at Sauber, where new technical director Mark Smith has already made clear that his potential impact on next year's car is limited.

Unfortunately, this does load the dice against having the kind of competitive multi-team battles we would like to see in F1.

This leads to all manner of suggestions of ways to level the playing field, but the bottom line is that there will always be teams that do a better job than others. Even in GP2, with spec kit, there are good teams and bad teams, so to argue that single-make racing guarantees equal footing desperately underestimates the importance of engineers, mechanics and good working practices.

That has always been a big part of the sport - it's about team and driver. And these are not modular entities, a great driver can make a good team stronger and vice versa.

People complain about F1 not being enough of a contest. Well, if you want a true sport, you have to allow things to be free and open enough to allow one team to dominate - that's a fact of life.

Attempting to prevent that is the thing that will undermine F1's credibility. And for those who would like more open regulations, that will only increase the potential for this to happen. It's a myth that this will somehow allow smaller teams to compete - those with the greater resources will always have an advantage.

That is the nature of grand prix racing - and always will be.

Perhaps a little more time should be spent appreciating the remarkable achievement of those teams and drivers who do get into supreme positions - for it is the sum of unimaginable work, determination and sound decision-making.