(Motorsports news) With an upgrade to the Red Bull’s RB19 for the Hungarian Grand Prix, Max Verstappen and teammate Sergio Perez were given a boost in speed just as Red Bull’s competitors seemed to be closing in on F1’s benchmark team. Since the update went live, the winning margins over the closest non-Red Bull vehicle have been above 30 seconds, bringing it back to where it was at the beginning of the season.
Rivals of Red Bull have no doubts that the alterations to the sidepods and floor have contributed to the car’s increased speed despite being billed as primarily being for reliability and cooling purposes. And as a result, teams like Mercedes have come to terms with the fact that if they want to compete for victories solely on the basis of pace, they will need to go even further with their own car designs.
Toto Wolff, the head of Mercedes, claimed that Red Bull’s Verstappen current dominance of Formula 1 was different from when his German manufacturer team was in the lead, but that did not make his team’s task of recovering any easier. “I don’t know whether our dominance was similar or less because I think we had years where we did it in the same way, but at least we had two cars that were fighting against each other,” he stated after witnessing Verstappen pull away in the Belgian GP.
That resulted in a small amount of amusement for everyone, but that isn’t the situation right now. It is what it is, and I often argue that we must fight back because it is a meritocracy. Had we anticipated that gap? Definitely not. I believe that with the most recent improvement, they now appear to have another advantage that they were able to take advantage of, But once more, it always brings me back to the idea that we must focus and perform at our highest level.
Many people think Red Bull has a chance to become the first team in F1 history to win every race in a season because of the magnitude of its advantage. Helmut Marko, the company’s motorsport advisor, now acknowledges that achievement would be feasible, despite senior management’s prior denials that it was even on its radar.
He responded, “If you think logically, then no because a lot can go wrong during a single race weekend,” when asked if winning all 22 races was conceivable. However, we never imagined that we could win the first 12 races as well, so I must ask, “Why not now?”
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