The inescapable conclusion from F1's slowing Red Bull debate in 2023

Motorsport: is it pure sport, or merely entertainment? As ever in life, the reality is somewhere in the middle. 

After the epic title fight between Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen in 2021 was followed by a Ferrari resurgence in early 2022, before Red Bull and its star took full control of Formula 1’s pecking order, the championship’s entertainment factor has waned of late.

As impressive as Verstappen’s march to a new record of consecutive victories this term has been, domination rather strangles sport. In 2023, F1 TV audiences are down, with its senior management now pointedly plugging social media engagement figures as an alternative success metric.  

But this isn’t new territory for F1, and there are many instances in the championship’s history of dominant teams being hobbled by rule changes deliberately introduced to shake up the competitive picture. Sometimes, regulation tweaks introduced for other reasons, such as safety, have made the difference.

But the truth is all motorsport is a direct product of ruleset strength. In other categories such as sportscars or touring cars, mandated performance balancing is widespread. This has been an additional conversation regarding F1 in 2023, with an evaluation taking place over engine equalisation. 

Seeing as it’s being talked about aplenty in 2023 – a year where Balance of Performance changes had a major impact on the result of the Le Mans 24 Hours – here we present the historical cases of top F1 teams being slowed by rules changes. Plus, we ask, is it really now time to slow down Red Bull and Verstappen?

Alex Kalinauckas, Jake Boxall-Legge, Gary Watkins, Charles Bradley delve into the debate.

Slowing down… The pesky garagistes

The ban on skirts for 1981

Photo by: Motorsport Images

Skirt easily visible on Nelson Piquet’s Brabham BT49 at Watkins Glen in 1980

The ban on sliding skirts was a flashpoint in the battle for the control of Formula 1 that could have split it right down the middle. A breakaway series looked a real possibility at times during what became known as the FISA versus FOCA war of 1980-81. Ranged on one side were FISA, the sporting arm of the FIA, and the grandee manufacturer teams, including Ferrari and Renault. On the other was FOCA, led by Bernie Ecclestone, and the garagistes.

There’s an argument that banning skirts for 1981 was driven by the grandees who had the ear of FISA president Jean-Marie Balestre. At least it’s one pedalled by the garagistes. They, put simply, were better at aerodynamics than the not-so-mighty factories, who had something to gain if the wings of the Cosworth-powered teams were quite literally clipped. Renault already had a power advantage with its V6 turbo, and Ferrari had its own forced induction engine in the pipeline.

More than 40 years on, Frank Dernie, head of aerodynamics at Williams at the time, has no doubt who was behind the ban.

"The British teams exploited ground effect better than Ferrari, Renault and Alfa Romeo, who were always more focused on their engines. But there was a safety problem" Gabriele Cadringher

“It was absolutely politically motivated,” he says. “Balestre had his mates at Renault and Ferrari. I think those teams put a lot of effort into lobbying FISA; they had the idea that if you removed sliding skirts, they would suddenly start doing all the winning.”

Dernie’s view isn’t contradicted by long-time FIA man Gabriele Cadringher. He didn’t join the governing body until January 1982, but he was working as a scrutineer the previous year and has an understanding of the machinations leading up to the ban on a full-skirted aero ground-effect set-up. 

“To be honest that point is true,” says Cadringher. “The British teams exploited ground effect better than Ferrari, Renault and Alfa Romeo, who were always more focused on their engines. But there was a safety problem. Those skirts were considered dangerous because if one stuck in the up position the car suddenly lost downforce.”

Photo by: Motorsport Images

Dernie, pictured with Frank Williams and Alan Jones at the 1981 San Marino GP, believes the rock hard suspension was more dangerous than skirts

Dernie argues to the contrary. He maintains that rock-hard suspension necessary to control the aero platform after the ban was far more dangerous than what came before.

“After that, the first time we had stable cars again was following Ayrton Senna’s death in 1994,” he says, referencing the introduction of a stepped underfloor and plank. 

For all the bad press that Balestre has received over the years, particularly in the pages of Autosport, he did have a genuine concern for safety. Fast-forward a couple of years, and his decision in October 1982 to reduce speeds with the introduction of a flat-bottom rule to do away with ground-effect tunnels. You will find arguments from period claiming that this change was the idea of the grandees. Not so, says Cadringher, who points out that Ferrari team boss Marco Piccinini voted against the move in the forerunner of the World Motor Sport Council. 

The argument that banning skirts was a move designed to slow the FOCA-aligned teams holds water. But it’s part of a complex story during arguably the most tumultuous period in F1. GW

Slowing down… Williams

The electronics ban for 1994

Photo by: Motorsport Images

Williams FW15C was the pinnacle of F1 driver-aid wizardry and delivered Prost his fourth title in 1993

As the growth of technology accelerated in the 1980s and 1990s, the influence of driver aids in Formula 1 began to expand in tandem. Active-suspension developments had been explored in the 1980s by Lotus, but swelled in popularity as the championship entered its next decade. Once traction control and anti-lock brakes had been added into the mix, by 1993 the cars had hit a peak of technological advancement.

PLUS: How F1's most sophisticated car claimed an era-ending sweep

Williams had been the biggest adopter of driver aids at the start of the 1990s; its 1991 FW14 featured early versions of traction control and a semi-automatic gearbox, before the FW14B of 1992 came with active suspension installed along with refinements to its other software. Although other teams followed suit, the FW14B was crushingly dominant in Nigel Mansell’s hands and the team missed out on pole position just once all year. Mansell had the 1992 title wrapped up by August with five races to spare, leaving the other teams having to invest heavily to match Williams’s electronics prowess.

The team’s follow-up, the FW15C, was built around active suspension rather than a retrofit of a passive car. Drivers Alain Prost and Damon Hill could opt for fully automatic gearshifts when required following changes to the transmission, and also benefited from the active ride’s malleability; while the suspension would react to track-surface variations to maintain a consistent aero balance, the drivers could override this with a button to stall the diffuser to gain more performance on the straights.

The FIA feared that the increasing popularity of driver aids was becoming unsustainable, costly and dangerous. Alessandro Zanardi’s crash in practice at Spa following an active-suspension issue on his Lotus only underlined the FIA’s decision

McLaren had responded with its MP4/8, an active-ride car that came with its own electronic bells and whistles, and Benetton had now included driver aids in its B193 where the previous car did not. Ferrari and Lotus had also pursued active-suspension systems, albeit to a lesser effect.

There were even more innovations being developed; Williams trialled a continuously variable transmission (CVT) gearbox to keep the engine at its peak power output for longer without the need for stepped gearchanges, and Benetton added four-wheel steering to its car. But the FIA feared that the increasing popularity of driver aids was becoming unsustainable, costly and dangerous. Alessandro Zanardi’s huge crash in practice at Spa following an active-suspension issue on his Lotus only underlined the FIA’s decision to ban driver aids for 1994.

The decision ended Williams’s dominance of F1 for a time, with Benetton having a better handle of the non-active formula for 1994 and 1995, before Williams returned to the front for the following two seasons. JBL

Slowing down… Ferrari

Changes to tyre rules for 2005

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

Farcical US GP was Ferrari’s sole victory of 2005 season

A curious case, this one. There can be no doubt that Formula 1 enthusiasts and stakeholders were getting sick of the metronomic success of one team and one driver – in this case the early-2000s superteam domination of Michael Schumacher and Ferrari.

F1 had been regularly tinkering with its qualifying format and, from 2003, points allocation with a brief to improve the spectacle. But the move to endurance tyre use for 2005 – one set permitted per car for qualifying and the race, with changes allowed only for considerable damage or punctures – is more complex a case than the rule changes deliberately setting out to curb Ferrari’s title run from 2000.

Bridgestone supplied Ferrari plus minnow teams Jordan and Minardi, with the rest of the field on Michelins. The Japanese company’s rubber not only wore more than Michelin’s over a stint, but they were also harder compounds to compensate, and so Ferrari was doubly hobbled in lacking instant qualifying grip.

As early as post-season testing in 2004, the team feared it was in trouble, and so it fast-tracked the F2005 to replace the F2004M with which it had contested the early rounds in 2005. But that car didn’t match rivals Renault and McLaren aerodynamically, even though Ferrari insisted it was a step on from its famed predecessor. Its sole victory came in the US Grand Prix farce. 

There are two important strands underpinning the whole saga, both of which involved the FIA. Back then, the governing body was ever trying to reduce speeds, a desire turbocharged in 2004 by Williams driver Ralf Schumacher’s Indianapolis crash and then Sauber racer Felipe Massa’s shunt in Montreal. It therefore forced through the endurance tyre requirement on safety grounds.

At the same time, the FIA, the Bernie Ecclestone-helmed F1 organisation and the teams were locked in various battles over the championship’s overall future – primarily, the drive to reduce costs that eventually led to F1 adopting a sole tyre supplier for 2007 and ending the Bridgestone-versus-Michelin war. These wranglings also took in Indy 2005 and it all formed a path back to in-race tyre changes returning for 2006. There had been a campaign by drivers – as well as headline-grabbing comments from Ferrari – to suggest that this approach was safer. 

Insight: Why tyre wars have largely become a thing of the past in motorsport

So, for 2006, Ferrari’s and Bridgestone’s disadvantage was removed at a stroke and, indeed, the Prancing Horse battled 2005 victor Renault for that year’s championships. AK

Slowing down… Renault

Mass dampers banned in 2006

Photo by: Gareth Bumstead

Renault's mass-damper was banned mid-way through the 2006 season but Alonso still defeated Michael Schumacher to win the title

“We won the championship, even if they didn’t want us to.” 

That’s how Fernando Alonso feels even 17 years on from the biggest argument of his 2006 title-winning campaign for Renault: the mass-damper saga. Here the political manoeuvring is much clearer cut, following a 2005 season in which the Spaniard and Renault had stormed to the front of the F1 pecking order at Ferrari’s expense.  

The device – a weight inside a tube with a spring on either side – had been pioneered by Renault late in 2004 and used during the 2005 campaign. It improved car stiffness sensitivity and therefore pace, and was later copied by rivals including the resurgent Ferrari and newcomer Red Bull. But Renault’s competitors were struggling to fine-tune the system and gain the estimated 0.3s per lap the Enstone squad reckoned it was worth. A lobbying effort to the FIA therefore commenced, with cost and safety concerns cited. 

"At one point, we felt the political pressure on the dominant position that we had, like often happens in Formula 1, [meant] it was banned. It was a surprise I remember" Fernando Alonso

The FIA decided to ban mass dampers on ‘moveable aerodynamic device’ grounds ahead of the 2006 German GP, where Renault’s pace rather disappeared as it competed without the system around which the R26 had been conceived. Yet the Hockenheim stewards approved it, only for the FIA to query the ruling and send the matter to its Court of Appeal. In a hearing ahead of the Turkish GP nearly a month later, that ruling was revoked and mass dampers declared illegal. 

“It was a device that we ran through the season,” says Alonso. “At one point, we felt the political pressure on the dominant position that we had, like often happens in Formula 1, [meant] it was banned. It was a surprise I remember, but it didn’t change too many things in the car.” 

Indeed, an assessment by Autosport in our 14-21 December 2006 magazine edition concluded that, with Renault’s pace corrected for the 0.3s mass-damper loss at subsequent events, Alonso’s 2006 points total would have increased by just two.

The championship instead swung on race circumstances such as rain, incidents and reliability failures. Alonso’s Italian GP engine failure also negated another controversial FIA call from the day before, that he’d impeded Felipe Massa’s Ferrari in qualifying. This had led the eventual champion to fume that “I don’t consider F1 anymore like a sport”. AK

Slowing down… All the rich teams

Mosley’s plan for two-tier F1 in 2010

Photo by: Andrew Ferraro / Motorsport Images

Lotus, Virgin and HRT all arrived on the grid for 2010, but all had disappeared by 2017

Formula 1’s modern-day inclusion of a cost cap has redefined the battle lines, with the intention of compressing the field through the resources the teams have at their disposal. But the current $135million plus add-ons dwarfs the FIA’s early attempt to introduce a cost cap for the 2010 season, which was pegged at a lowly £40million. This was entirely optional, with bonuses granted to those teams that aligned with the cap; they could expect unlimited testing and more technical freedom, with what was effectively a proto-DRS earmarked for the front and rear wings, along with the removal of rev limits for their engines.

This came amid a tender process to welcome new teams onto the grid, tempted by the reduced spend offered by the cap. But many of the existing teams rejected those plans on the grounds that it would create a championship with two sets of rules.

Ferrari attempted to veto the plans but, when its hopes to gain an injunction were not upheld, it joined the other Formula One Teams Association (FOTA)-aligned squads in threatening to withdraw. The FIA and Bernie Ecclestone eventually conceded defeat on the two-tier technical plans, but the FOTA teams began to develop plans for a breakaway championship to strongarm the governing parties into dropping the cost cap altogether.

Eventually, the teams, after a walkout from an FIA Technical Working Group meeting, worked with ringmaster Ecclestone to sign a new Concorde Agreement, bringing an end to the two-tier/cost-cap formula and ending the war between the FIA and FOTA. But the new teams that had already signed up to F1 under the initial cost-cap promise were hampered significantly in setting up new operations in an era of very loose controls on spending.

In essence, it produced a two-tier formula after all: the better-funded F1 teams with nine-figure budgets, and the underfunded new operations in the forms of Virgin (later Manor), Campos (later Hispania) and Lotus (later Caterham). None of those teams survived past 2016, and never strayed far from the back. JBL

Slowing down… Mercedes

Changes to rear-floor rules for 2021

Photo by: Charles Coates / Motorsport Images

Mercedes was utterly dominant in 2020 with its W11 before changes to the floor brought Red Bull into the mix

By 2021, Mercedes had clinched seven successive world title doubles. During that run, the squad had some of its most significant developments banned: what Lewis Hamilton had dubbed its “party” qualifying engine modes; and dual-axis steering. Mercedes had also successfully negotiated a whole aero ruleset change brought in, although poorly conceived, for 2017 to improve the show it was dominating.

But nothing had the impact on Mercedes’ form like the rear-floor rule tweaks introduced for 2021. This led its W12 successor to 2020’s W11 – F1’s fastest ever car – to be beaten by Red Bull’s RB16B in the 2021 drivers’ championship. Although that ending still required the Abu Dhabi officiating debacle to occur…

“We lost the 2021 drivers’ championship for many reasons,” says Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff. “One was the final race, but we also lost it because those regulations were set in place in order to reduce the advantage we had. 2020 was a super dominant year for us. I think it was the best car we ever had. And then towards the end of the season they change the regs by cutting the floor out.”

By the time Mercedes realised the implication of rule tweak for its 2021 design – revealed with major rear sliding in pre-season testing – it was too late

That’s not quite the picture. The 2021 rear-floor changes stemmed from the cost-saving measures needed for F1 teams to survive the COVID-19 lockdowns. In May 2020, the FIA received unanimous support from the teams to carry over car designs into 2021. But changes had to be made to reduce downforce as Pirelli’s 2019 tyres, still in use after the teams had rejected development to make the rubber more durable for 2020 (something that happened anyway after tyre safety issues in early 2021), needed support from the speed gains the teams carried on making.

The floor changes got unanimous support too. But, despite initial thinking being that it would hurt the high-rake approach pioneered by Red Bull, in fact it was the Mercedes and Aston Martin teams running low-rake designs that were most impacted. The naturally downforce producing high-rake design made the cut less of a problem. By the time Mercedes realised the implication of rule tweak for its 2021 design – revealed with major rear sliding in pre-season testing – it was too late.

“At Silverstone we unlocked more of the potential of the car and got back into the championship,” concludes Wolff. “But these regs were clearly targeted to re-establish the pecking order.” AK

IndyCar: How it became a spec formula

Photo by: Paul Webb, USA LAT Photographic

Dixon's victory at Watkins Glen in 2006 with a Panoz was the last up against Dallara before its monopolisation set in

In the halcyon days of the CART World Series, constructors such as Chaparral, Galles, Lola, March, Penske, Reynard and Swift did battle from 1979 until the early 2000s. Cosworth, Chevrolet, Mercedes, Honda and Toyota were among the title-winning engine manufacturers. 

Several years after the 1996 split that divided Indycars into two series came the beginning of its route to spec chassis when, in 2003, Indy Racing League boss Tony George demanded new rules for less-expensive cars and production-based engines. Dallara and G Force were the only two manufacturers to build chassis (Falcon was approved but the project never got going), and over time the Italian marque prevailed. 

The subject is clouded by the split and reunification of Indycars. Technically, the last non-Dallara IndyCar victory was recorded by Will Power’s Panoz DP01 at Long Beach in 2008, but this was a round of the Champ Car World Series and a true spec series. The final non-Dallara IRL win was Scott Dixon’s Panoz GF09B at Watkins Glen in 2006 for Chip Ganassi Racing. 

Ganassi managing director Mike Hull explains: “When we entered the Indy Racing League version of IndyCar racing, we were a stalwart of the G Force/Panoz car – it was a great product. But what happened was Don Panoz had less and less customers, which really affected its ability to react to create the product necessary to be the car to beat in IndyCar.”

IndyCar only became a spec series for Dallara DW12s in 2012 but, in truth, it effectively had been for years since Dallara won the numbers game.

PLUS: The long evolution of Dallara's Indy 500 winner 

“It used to be that we worked inside a sea-freight container and now we work inside a shoebox,” quips Hull. “But what it has done is allowed us to expand the internal resource to learn how to go racing. If you have a car that has a gazillion horsepower and unlimited innovative areas to work on, you just bite off the big chunks. 

Photo by: Michael L. Levitt

The game has changed considerably since 1999 when Ganassi ran Reynards against competition from Lola, Penske, Swift and Eagle

“When you have a race car that’s very finite, what you have to concentrate on is your people and the systems in place to make your car better – all the small details suddenly became very important.” 

IndyCar introduced manufacturer aero kits between 2015 and 2017, in an attempt at car differentiation, but this spiralled out of control to the tune of tens of millions of dollars and served only to make the cars downforce-heavy and hard to race. 

"We have stability now because we have two very well-developed engines that means you get convergence over time" David Salters

On the engine side, after a variety of engine types and sizes were allowed across the CART and IRL years, IndyCar became a spec Honda series from 2006-11 due to Chevrolet and Toyota pulling out. But Chevy returned with Ilmor for 2012 – along with a shortlived Lotus/Judd effort – and the rulebook currently mandates 2.2-litre V6 engines with twin turbos (Honda ran a single turbo in 2012-13). It remains a Chevy-Honda duopoly, with a common electrical hybrid element that will add 150bhp next season. 

“We have stability now because we have two very well-developed engines that means you get convergence over time,” says Honda chief David Salters. “There are always small differences that you work hard to find an advantage with, although some parts are spec and there’s a limited number that we can change to keep the costs down. There’s still good competition between us, and that happens within a sensible, cost-controlled budget.” CB

WEC: BoP through the back door

Photo by: Alexander Trienitz

Once considered anathema, BoP is now integral to Le Mans

Someone from the Automobile Club de l’Ouest once said that there would never be Balance of Performance in the top class at the Le Mans 24 Hours. This writer is certain of it. When it was said and by whom, he isn’t sure, though he has a good idea of the latter. But a good 10 years on, the BoP is an integral building block of the Hypercar class at the French enduro and in the World Endurance Championship. It’s arguably even the foundation stone of what we are trumpeting as a new golden age.

The BoP allows cars built to different rulesets to race together in the WEC and, potentially, in the IMSA SportsCar Championship. But it wasn’t the announcement of the LMDh category in January 2020 as an alternative route into the WEC that made balancing the cars a necessary evil. That came six months previously. 

There was no place – and no need – for the BoP in the original Le Mans Hypercar rulebook for four-wheel-drive prototypes published in December 2019. It came in after a group of manufacturers – Aston Martin, Ferrari and McLaren – went back to rulemakers the ACO and the FIA in February the following year, arguing that the regulations as they stood made for a category that was too costly. One of the new proposals on the table was to allow a manufacturer to rework a road-going hypercar or super-sportscar to go up against the LMH prototypes.

PLUS: The long road to convergence for sportscar racing's new golden age

Aston opted for the Adrian Newey-inspired Valkyrie as the basis of a WEC challenger, a car that went onto the backburner the following year and is now about to be resurrected. An understanding of the challenges of racing what was and is still intended to be a rear-drive non-hybrid against all-wheel-drive machinery explains why the British manufacturer made the introduction of the BoP a condition of its entry.

The organisers and Toyota had no choice but to agree. The Japanese manufacturer, incumbent in the WEC since 2012, was the only other major OEM with an LMH project on the go. It was a case of needs must.

“We have never been happy with the BoP,” says Toyota Gazoo Racing Europe technical director Pascal Vasselon. “But we had to accept it; we had to compromise because we needed competitors.”

The same logic applied in the dying days of LMP1 after Audi and then Porsche had withdrawn and left Toyota as the last manufacturer standing. BoP crept in through the back door as the rulemakers promised the privateers a fighting chance against the lone factory in 2018-19. It was billed as an Equivalence of Technology, the means by which petrol and diesel-powered hybrids had been equated from 2014, but it was BoP by any other name. 

The arrival of the BoP at the top of the sportscar tree was meant to be temporary, but no one could have predicted how the sands would shift. BoP was here to stay. GW

Conclusion: Is it time to slow down Red Bull and Verstappen?

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

Verstappen and Red Bull have been the dominant combination of F1 2023, reaching new heights in the process

“Wanting to slow Red Bull this year shows a massive lack of knowledge of the history of Formula 1. I could imagine someone who has only been interested in F1 for three or four years thinking [the domination] is unusual. But that’s bollocks. It isn’t unusual at all.” 

Those are the words of famed F1 engineer Frank Dernie, scotching an argument gaining ever more traction with every Max Verstappen 2023 victory – that Red Bull’s relentless march is too tedious, that something must be done. In short, changing F1’s rules to try to ensure competitive parity. 

“Is it time to slow down Red Bull and Verstappen?” That question is being asked precisely because it’s being done so elsewhere: on social media platforms by fans, and in F1 race weekend press conferences to drivers and team personnel.

"We don’t want to have any help. We want to close the gap by our own means" Andrea Stella

It combines with, as we’ve covered, historical precedents of dominant squads being hobbled by rule changes – even though the reality has often been far more complex, with regulation tweaks bound up in the leviathan of motorsport decision making, than such simple recollections often suggest. And then there’s the cohort of new F1 followers, harvested from Netflix and the 2021 title saga – with a healthy dose post-pandemic enthusiasm masking the end of Mercedes’ domination and a plethora of alternative storylines added in – who are encountering the cold reality that sometimes one team just smashes the rest, that not every F1 campaign is an epic.

Posed as it is, that question ultimately breaks down into two: should the Red Bull RB19 have its advantage slashed by a specific rule change, or does F1 need to take Balance of Performance inspiration from other series? For both, and the overarching philosophical debate too, the answer is no – an utter rejection of the suggestion. Firstly because, as Dernie notes, this is not virgin territory for F1. 

“Red Bull has got the best car, but the gap from its car to the others, there have been many times when the gap has been much bigger,” explains the long-time Williams engineer. “Because the cars are so reliable now and Max is brilliant, they are winning a lot. But they are not winning by the kind of margins we’ve seen in the past. I remember one race at Brands Hatch [in 1986] where Nigel Mansell and Nelson Piquet [both driving for Williams] lapped everyone twice – except for McLaren’s Alain Prost who was P3. And he was in sight of being lapped for a second time by the end.” 

F1 already has a minor form of performance balancing that arrived in 2021 – the sliding scale regarding aerodynamic testing and development based on constructors’ standings. It’s “a kind of balance, not balance of performance but balance of allocation”, notes Ferrari team boss Fred Vasseur, who feels that’s “enough”. 

Photo by: Ferrari

Opposition team principals remain opposed to measures that would peg back Red Bull

F1 also has major rule changes for chassis and engine designs already planned for 2026, really just two years away. And F1 even conducted a PR policy of embracing Red Bull’s bid to win all 22 races this year prior to September’s Singapore GP. Liberty Media CEO Greg Maffei quipped that “short of breaking his leg, a la Tonya Harding, I’m not sure what we can do”, while hastily pointing to alternative metrics of viewership other than the downtrending TV figures. There is hope that the idea of embracing greatness will pay off in the short term, although of course that needs commentators on all platforms to avoid spouting off at every slightly dull race or Red Bull win. Fat chance…

But, more fundamentally than all of that, such a drastic intervention goes against F1’s meritocratic ethos. It is simply up to Red Bull’s rivals to do a better job. Wonderfully, at least publicly, they seem to be onside with that.

“I’m not a big fan of the Balance of Performance or any kind of artifice like this,” concludes Vasseur. “It’s not the DNA at all of F1.” 

“I agree,” says McLaren team principal Andrea Stella, speaking alongside Vasseur at Monza in September. “We don’t want to have any help. We want to close the gap by our own means. And we like this challenge. And that’s what we want for the next couple of years.” 

“As a team principal, I don’t want to jump on the bandwagon that others have done in the past of saying we need to change the regulations because we can’t continue with the dominance of a team,” states Mercedes’ Toto Wolff. “If a team dominates in the way Max has done with Red Bull, then fair dos. This is a meritocracy.

“As long as you comply to the regulations – technical, sporting and financial – you just need to say, ‘Well done and it’s up to us to catch up’. If that takes a long time, then it takes a long time. But I remember people crying foul when it was us. Entertainment follows sport and not the other way around. You can’t be WWE and just script content. We don’t want to be scripted content.” 

Good. But now it’s up to Ferrari, McLaren, Mercedes and co to make the difference, to create the F1 spectacle and intensity we know can exist because we’ve seen it so recently. It can happen – it just needs to be reached in the right way. No intervention, no BoP. AK

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

Rival teams have shown it is possible to beat Red Bull in 2023, and now must attempt to do so more often