Yesterday, Red Bull offered a 14th consecutive victory this season. Since the start of the year, the Austrian team has been unstoppable. She swept up everything in her path and left nothing to the other teams. Between the record number of wins for a team and the record number of consecutive wins for Max Verstappen, Red Bull already has a hand on the title of world champion. This domination is unpleasant for the image of the sport in the eyes of the fans, but also for the competitors. The Mercedes team wants the FIA to put in place measures to stop the domination of Red Bull. During the Italian Grand Prix at Monza, Lewis Hamilton asked to change things so he could fight with the championship leader. He pointed to two specific arguments. The banning of the DAS system incorporated in 2020 and engine map changes for qualifications. According to the seven-time world champion, these measures were taken to break the domination of Mercedes. So why not penalize in the same way with Red Bull. Christian Horner spoke about these remarks.
“The regulations are quite stable. We now have three sets of regulations: Technical, Sporting and Financial. The technical and sporting regulations seem to be reasonably equal between the teams. As for the financial regulations, it seems that there is a bit of fiddling from time to time… But I think the regulations are stable for the next two years. We expect our competitors… look at the leap McLaren has made recently. We expect there to be convergence, you know, even this year, before we get to 2024. I’m not aware of any drastic and significant regulatory changes this year, or next year. We already have a big change planned for 2026, which will be a complete reset. Even though we have won a lot this year, a lot of the races, including the last one, have been quite entertaining. In any case, from our point of view, Zandvoort was. So yeah, I don’t think the sport is lacking in entertainment right now.”
Ferrari and McLaren against this opinion
For Fred Vasseur, team principal of Scuderia Ferrari, the teams must improve themselves to reach the level of Red Bull.
“I’m not a big fan of ‘balance of performance’ (BoP) or any other tricks like that, it’s not the DNA of Formula 1 at all. And we already have the allocation of the wind tunnel time [dépendant du classement des constructeurs]. It’s a kind of balance, not performance balance but allocation balance, and that’s good enough”
Andrea Stella is of the same opinion, at the start of the year the McLarens did not have the performance they have today. It’s up to the team to work hard to find solutions.
“Yes I agree. We don’t want help. We want to close the gap on our own. And we love this challenge. And that’s what we want for the next two years.”
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And Bref
Red Bull team boss Christian Horner recently spoke about the behavior of his opponents. He is annoyed by Mercedes’ desire to penalize them because of their power.
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