Max Verstappen says that one team dominating is “nothing new” in Formula 1.
After seven years of Mercedes leading the way, Red Bull has become F1’s dominant force winning 23 of the 28 races since new rules were introduced at the start of last year.
That followed one of the most memorable seasons of all time in 2021 when Mercedes and Red Bull went toe-to-toe.
But speaking ahead of the Spanish Grand Prix, Verstappen noted how rare it is in F1 history that the two top teams are equally matched.
“The dominance, we’ve always seen this in F1, it’s nothing new,” the two-time world champion said.
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“I think the longer you leave the regulations the same, the closer people will get. So maybe this is something that we need to look at.
“You have the odd year or two years where there are two teams fighting, maybe potentially a third team.
“But overall, when you look back at the 80s, 90s, the 2000s, the early 2010s and all the way until 2020, it’s been pure dominance of a certain team.”
One thing no team has ever achieved, however, is to win every race in a single season, with McLaren coming closest after missing out on just one victory in 1988.
So could Red Bull be the first in 2023?
“How it looks like at the moment, I think we can,” Verstappen stated. “But that’s very unlikely to happen. There are always things that go wrong, you have retirements or whatever.
“We will always get to tracks where it doesn’t work out exactly or whatever, bad luck in qualifying, you make your own mistakes.”
This period of success has been a long time coming for Verstappen, who spent four years watching on from Red Bull while Mercedes dominated.
But the 25-year-old was always confident that his moment would come.
“No doubts, but you have to be patient,” he said on what it takes to become F1 champion.
“I have learned to be very patient over the years, but I always believed in this project because I saw how the people worked and how motivated they were to reach the top.
“You can’t force something like that and say we have to win now when at one point we were the third fastest team. It’s a process and then you get a few people in maybe different positions, you get a good group together.
“At a certain point, it just clicked from one year to the next. We really made a leap forward.
“Of course, in hindsight, it’s easy to say, ‘I saw this coming’. You don’t know that. But I believed in the process because I felt like something was coming.
“We had a few years where it was just a bit of a struggle. Sometimes we had a pretty solid package, but we lacked top speed, which made it very difficult to show the true potential, then came Honda, which was again a bit of a work in progress, but after a year we were already very competitive, which was great to see.”