Winning the next two Formula 1 championships should be "easy" for Lewis Hamilton, Alain Prost claims.
After the Styrian Grand Prix last weekend, it became clear the Briton and his Mercedes team will again be the team to beat in 2020, having eased to victory with teammate Valtteri Bottas recovering to second.
And with the current cars set to be used until the end of 2021, and development also being limited, the advantage Mercedes looks to hold over the rest is going to be very difficult to claw back in.
So when asked how many world titles Hamilton could amass in F1, the current Renault advisor was honest.
“He has six, I would say eight, easy," he told Reuters.
“I cannot see anybody [else] winning this year. Maybe Valtteri [Bottas].
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“It depends on how many races you have and if you miss one or two because you have a mechanical problem, you never know. He’s in the same car.
“But… I cannot see another car winning [a championship] against a Mercedes this year and next year."
One reason Prost believes the Hamilton/Mercedes partnership has been so dominant is that it is the longest-running on the grid, having joined up back in 2013.
“The more stable he is in a team, the more stable he is in his life, you can see that he is better,” he said.
“To beat Lewis for a World Championship, especially with that car and the team he has now, is going to be very difficult.
“Almost impossible in normal circumstances."
From 2022 onwards, however, new technical regulations and other measures aimed at closing up the grid could finally be the change that brings an end to their dominance.
And former technical director Pat Symonds believes Renault's recently announced returnee for 2021, Fernando Alonso, could be the man most likely to do it.
"There’s definitely unfinished business,” he told F1's Beyond The Grid podcast.
"You can talk about triple crowns and you talk about wanting to win Indy and he’d like to do all these things, but I know Fernando well enough to know that there’s nothing he wants more than another Formula 1 world championship.
“Fernando’s not a journeyman, he hasn’t come back because he’s bored, he hasn’t come back because he wants to stay the world again. He’s come back to win.
“One of the great things about Fernando is that he was very quick and very able to adapt to whatever the situation was," Symonds added.
“Will the wily old Fernando Alonso be the first to suss out how best to get the performance from that [2022] car? I think the answer will be yes.
“I think he’ll be very quick to figure out what matters and what doesn’t matter. How to work with the engineers to get the best setup from the car, how the 18-inch tyres behave differently from the 13-inch – all these kind of things.
“I was amused to see that he’s already starting to direct the team and tell them to forget about 2021 and get on with 2022. I think he’s pretty adaptable and he will get the best from the 2022 car.”
