Red Bull head to the Canadian Grand Prix this weekend aiming to extend their run of having been the only team to win this season, as a result of their utter dominance.
Red Bull haven’t just been dominant this season, the Austrians have been remarkable since the start of the new aerodynamic regulations last year, thanks to the genius that is chief technical officer Adrian Newey.
The RB19 in particular is a thing of beauty, which genuinely could win every single race this season.
George Russell predicted that this could be the case following the season-opener in Bahrain, after Red Bull cruised to their first 1-2 of 2023.
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They boast a mammoth 135-point lead in the standings after just seven races, with reigning World Champion Max Verstappen having built a 53-point advantage in the Drivers’ Championship.
Perhaps the most concerning thing about their advantage is that nobody appears to be able to reduce the gap, regardless of how many upgrades they introduce.
Whilst Mercedes clinched an impressive double podium at the Spanish Grand Prix, the Germans still finished 24 seconds behind Verstappen, despite their new concept.
Ferrari are another side who just can’t do anything about Red Bull’s lead, to the point where the Italians and Mercedes have been labelled as the “bad guys”.
Given that the current regulations won’t change until 2026, there is a real chance that Newey’s aerodynamic knowledge will extend Red Bull’s superiority into 2024 and 2025, something several fans will likely be frustrated to hear.
“The numbers are staggering, they’re so dominant this year,” F1 journalist Glenn Freeman said on a recent episode of The Race F1 Podcast.
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“In terms of people not talking enough about how remarkable Red Bull is, it’s exactly what we do every single time a team is dominating F1 because most people want competition so quite often, we end up framing the team doing the dominating as the bad guys.
“Pure performance-wise they’re not the bad guys here, the bad guys are Ferrari and Mercedes who right now aren’t doing a good enough job, just like how the bad guys when Mercedes was dominating were Ferrari and Red Bull not doing good enough job or Renault for producing a rubbish engine.
“These things always get skewed, eventually it happened to Ferrari at the start of the 2000s. Ross Brawn said for a while everyone loves seeing Ferrari win and then people got tired of it. With so many races now and with so much dominance, it feels like they’ve been dominating for longer than they have, they’ve only been dominant for about a 12-month period.”