The parallels between Red Bull's current form and the ending of Schumacher's F1 reign

After a whirlwind opening to its 2024 season, the Formula 1 circus is currently settling into its long-awaited interval period. As it turns out, cramming 14 races into the span of five months requires quite a lot of effort to keep up with; it's not quite the same rate of races compared to 2020's COVID-enforced quick-fire calendar, but it certainly rivals it in travel time.

And the timing of the summer break rather left us at a cliffhanger, with the sort of dramatic licence that pundits espouse to be impossible to script, even though the storylines are probably the first thing that any screenwriter would include.

Everything is left to be resolved after the summer: can McLaren and Mercedes continue to make inroads into an unlikely championship tilt? Can Ferrari work its way back into the hunt for victories? And, overall, is Red Bull's period of domination over?

The latter point comes with a degree of subjectivity, but it's certainly been the case in the last few races that the identity of the winning car isn't a foregone conclusion. Red Bull still has a grasp on the drivers' championship thanks to Max Verstappen's brilliance and may retain its dominance there, yet the constructors' standings are starting to make for sobering reading. The outcome there will depend on the Milton Keynes outfit's ability to hit the ground running after the break, when the field returns from its hibernation at Zandvoort.

If not, then the 'second Red Bull era' may look to be at its end, based on the lessons offered by F1's broad and varied history. Across the multiple eras of a single team largely dominating the championship, it's incredibly rare that a team can drop off at the end of a season and then simply pick it up again into the next, as if unbothered by the entire conceit of the final rounds.

And, 20 years ago, this certainly described Ferrari and Michael Schumacher as they wrapped up the teams' and drivers' championships in Hungary and Belgium respectively. After winning 12 of the opening 13 races, Schumacher only won one of the remaining five.

Verstappen's customary position of dominance has been eroded in recent rounds, leaving Red Bull's constructors' position looking threatened

Photo by: Red Bull Content Pool

There were mitigating factors, sure, but it suddenly appeared as though the dominant dyad across the early 2000s had suddenly run out of steam. Ferrari's performance was still worthy of race wins, demonstrated by Rubens Barrichello's pair of wins in Italy and China, but the Prancing Horse's slow canter across the finish line somewhat led into its flat 2005 season.

Here's how dominant Ferrari's F2004 was: in the Hungarian round in which the Italian squad clinched its sixth consecutive constructors' title, Schumacher won by 4.6s from Barrichello, but the third-placed Fernando Alonso was a whopping 44.5s away from the race lead by the finish.

Two weeks later, Schumacher locked up the drivers' title with four rounds to spare, but he was soundly beaten by Kimi Raikkonen - the Finn energised by a flurry of safety cars and McLaren's newly B-specced MP4-19 chassis. Schumacher, by comparison, was uncharacteristically sedate. He made a poor start and was passed with seemingly little effort by Raikkonen and Williams' Juan Pablo Montoya.

Barrichello was an interloper among those battling for the lead and made the podium at the chequered flag, but the victory was really contested by eventual winner Montoya, on his final outing for Williams, and his future team-mate Raikkonen

Perhaps Schumacher was just simply aiming to sew up the championship with minimal fuss and drove within himself to make it happen. Yet, neither he nor Barrichello appeared to present much of a match to the McLarens and Williamses, even though the pair of British constructors had spent most of 2004 floundering with flawed aerodynamic concepts. Montoya's race only came unstuck when one of his Michelin tyres elected to delaminate, echoing the same issue that David Coulthard had faced earlier in the race...

Although Barrichello got pole at Monza, Ferrari's times in the opening part of qualifying (as the one-lap system was needlessly complicated by a 'Q1' session to set the running order of 'proper' qualifying) were not as impressive as any of the Williams or BAR drivers.

The ultimate 1-2 result was relatively convincing by the end, although Schumacher was caught out by a greasy track surface and suffered a first-lap spin that cost track position. Even though his dry-weather Bridgestones were less effective in those conditions versus the Michelin, leading Ferrari to start Barrichello on the intermediate, it was nonetheless a lazy spin - one uncharacteristic of Schumacher's driving that season.

Or at least it would have been, had Schumacher not been poor in China. He'd already stuffed up his qualifying lap with a spin and, after starting from the pitlane, walked into a number of incidents (punting Jaguar's Christian Klien being one of them, suffering a puncture another).

McLaren belatedly arrived to the party in 2004 as Raikkonen won at Spa, signalling the start of Ferrari's relative decline

Photo by: LAT Photographic

Barrichello did his job as Designated Number Two to pick up the pieces and win, but even he sagely noted that "we still had the quickest car, but not by as much as Monza. There, it was much faster. Here, it was not". Indeed, Barrichello came under great scrutiny from Jenson Button and Kimi Raikkonen, but Ferrari rather did what Red Bull is currently doing now: executed the race a little better and timed the pitstops to maintain track position.

Suzuka was convincingly Schumacher's return to form, and more akin to his race wins earlier in the season with a 14-second advantage to his brother Ralf, but he again was nowhere at the Brazil finale.

Barrichello was an interloper among those battling for the lead and made the podium at the chequered flag, but the victory was really contested by eventual winner Montoya, on his final outing for Williams, and his future team-mate Raikkonen. Alonso was also ensconced within the lead battle for most of the race, but dropped to fourth as a two-stopper failed to bear fruit.

After such dominance earlier in the year, Ferrari looked to have been caught up. Although Renault and BAR had provided a firm challenge earlier in the season, the former having chalked up the only non-Schumacher win in the opening 13 rounds thanks to Jarno Trulli's Monaco masterclass, they could not regularly match Ferrari's might.

McLaren had reworked its MP4-19 against the background of a power struggle between Adrian Newey and Martin Whitmarsh's patented matrix management system (which Whitmarsh won), and ironed out the creases in a design rooted in its never-raced MP4-18. For its part, Williams had discarded its walrus nose and reverted to a more conventional design, which deleted the weight penalty at the front end and restored some of the missing balance in one fell swoop.

Although that didn't imbue Williams with momentum for 2005, McLaren certainly carried its progression into the new year while Renault took a step forward over the winter. Ferrari, in the meantime, was hamstrung by the no-tyre-change rule introduced in 2005 as Bridgestone failed to get the formula right.

The F2004 gained notoriety that year for joining the pantheon of F1's most dominant cars, adding its name alongside the exalted McLaren MP4/4, the Lotus 72, and the Williams FW14B. Since then, Red Bull has followed suit with its RB19, but the current RB20 appears to have hit a development ceiling and upgrades over the mid-season period have offered vastly diminished returns.

Williams also joined the fight for victories in 2004 and ended the year with Montoya on top in Brazil

Photo by: Lyndon McNeil

There are certainly parallels to draw between the end of Ferrari's scarlet-tinged reign and Red Bull's current dip in form relative to its previously high standards, as the other cars improve in stature versus a former world-beater. Of course, only the final 10 races will truly reveal if history is rather repeating itself, or if Red Bull can hit back after a summer reset.

McLaren and Mercedes, however, will continue to offer stern competition. Although it has let opportunities go begging, McLaren is having to 'learn to win' on the fly, and it certainly has armed itself with enough information on what not to do in victory-critical situations. Mercedes, for its part, is proving that such knowledge has not left the building when chances present themselves.

Red Bull knows it has to dig deep - else, it could watch itself become leapfrogged in the same manner that Ferrari did when the V10 era drew to a close. And not even Max Verstappen's sheer force of will can change that if the car can't be developed any further...

Can Red Bull respond after the summer break and avoid history repeating itself?

Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images