Max Verstappen believes Red Bull has a chance to win every race in 2023 F1, but he also anticipates other teams to cut the gap as the season progresses.
Red Bull is looking to win three titles in a row, and so far it has been another fantastic year.
The team has won the first six races of the season by a margin of more than 20 seconds at each track when the race is completed under green flag circumstances. Verstappen has won four from six races while team-mate Sergio Perez has the other two.
Verstappen won the championship on the final lap in Abu Dhabi, ending 2021 in a thrilling nail-biter, but last year couldn’t have been more different thanks to his dominance.
In the history of Formula One, no team has ever finished first in every race, regardless of driver error, reliability or team strategy. With the increasing number of races—which peaked in 2022—this has become even more challenging.
The RB19 car is anticipated to be exceptionally fast at the Spanish Grand Prix this weekend, and the 25-year-old boldly stated his team could be on the first step of the podium in every race, but he also believes other teams will be able to play catch-up.
“With how it looks at the moment I think we can, but that’s very unlikely to happen,” Verstappen said in an interview. “There are always things that go wrong or you have retirements or whatever… But on pure pace, I think at the moment it looks like it.
“We will always get the tracks where maybe it doesn’t work out exactly or whatever bad luck in qualifying, you make your own mistakes.
“If you keep on tweaking things, some team will always find something and then it takes a bit of time for everyone to catch up.”
There are also worries that Red Bull’s dominance may negatively damage F1’s newfound popularity following Netflix’s documentary Drive to Survive.
Toto Wolff and other team executives have stated that it would be incorrect to introduce regulations intended to increase F1’s level of competition.
In light of the history of teams that went on to win the majority of races in succeeding seasons, Verstappen is also unconcerned about Red Bull’s all-conquering pace.
“About the dominance, I mean we’ve always seen this in F1, it’s nothing new,” the reigning world champion added. “I think the longer you leave the regulations the same, the closer people will get. So maybe this is something we need to look at.
“You have the odd year, or maybe two years, where there are two teams fighting, maybe potentially a third team.
“But overall when you look back at the 80s, the 90s, 2000s and early-2010s to all the way until 2020, it’s been pure dominance of certain teams.”
Verstappen appears poised to cruise to the championship unless Perez steps up, since Red Bull already has more than double the points of Aston Marin, who are second in the constructor’s championship standings.
