Red Bull and Max Verstappen are currently the duo to beat for everyone else on the grid. After the 2022 regulation changes, Red Bull seems to have taken complete advantage of it and has built a huge gap with the RB19.
However, Former Le Mans winner, Richard Bradley believes that the FIA will do everything possible to end Red Bull’s domination in the next major regulation changes coming up in 2026.
“The way of FOM and the FIA, they always design rule cycles specifically to screw the team that’s leading at the time,” he told the On Track GP podcast. “Because they will literally want to put that team down.”
“We’ve seen it over history. They did it with Williams when they got rid of the active suspension and all the electronic aids. They did it for Ferrari so all of a sudden Renault became dominant and that’s when [Fernando] Alonso won his championships.”
Helmut Marko has said that the target for the rest of the season is to win all races 👀
“Now there is room to win everyone. And if we’ve already made twelve, that’s the goal now.”
[ORF] pic.twitter.com/svuCXGhQYt
— RBR Daily (@RBR_Daily) August 3, 2023
“You can tell that they’re going to target Red Bull. Then we’re going to find what makes Red Bull weak and try and exploit that. So there will come a time in the cycle that Red Bull will lose out and another manufacturer may come to the top. I think then that’s when you’re going to have to seriously reevaluate the situation.”
He believes that the FIA and FOM will make it difficult for Red Bull to continue their domination from the 2026 season onwards. But will their domination continue till 2026?
Will Red Bull continue to dominate Formula 1 until 2026?
At the moment, Red Bull is being hunted by every single team on the grid. This includes exceptional teams who have experienced their own form of domination. Teams like Mercedes and Ferrari have faced similar types of domination in the past.
Lewis Hamilton and Mercedes completely dominated the sport for 7 years until Max Verstappen was able to put a stop to it. Ferrari dominated with Michael Schumacher in the early 2000s until Fernando Alonso and Renault halted it.
When we look at the Mercedes example, Max Verstappen was able to beat Lewis before the regulation change came into effect in 2022. So it is not necessary that a regulation change will have to come into effect for Red Bull’s domination to end.
Christian Horner on the Mercedes dominance:
“Seven long years… that’s a long time..”
“You get less for crimes!”
“We had to wait to get back into a competitive position. We had to do a lot of watching of a lot of Mercedes winning and so on. But we never lost sight of our… pic.twitter.com/O4rcCQafsN
— RBR Daily (@RBR_Daily) August 3, 2023
The FIA has already made some regulation changes to make it difficult for the leaders to continue their domination. The regulations concerning Aerodynamic Testing Time (ATT) give the leaders the least amount of time to test their cars using the wind tunnel or CFD simulator. This provides the teams chasing an advantage in their hunt for the Championship in the following year.
The teams with the best chance of challenging Red Bull are Mercedes, Ferrari, McLaren, and maybe Aston Martin. We have seen McLaren and Mercedes make some serious changes in their cars to unlock more pace. Ferrari has not made any serious developments over the weeks. Aston Martin seemed competitive at the beginning of the season but has fallen off the pace since the Canadian Grand Prix.
Let’s see how the teams develop their cars in the coming weeks and how long Red Bull dominate the sport.