Can Red Bull Run The Table?

Can Red Bull win every race this season?

Short answer: no. Long answer: also no.

Sure Red Bull’s dominance on Sunday was overwhelming, but to suggest they can win all 23 races this season seems preposterous. Or “Insane in the Bahrain,” if you will.

Don’t get me wrong, Red Bull’s domination in 2023’s inaugural race was downright scary. Max Verstappen finished almost 12 seconds ahead of teammate Sergio Perez and nearly 40 ahead of Fernando Alonso in third. Carlos Sainz (48 seconds behind), Lewis Hamilton (51 seconds back), and George Russell (56 seconds back) were even less competitive. In a sport where the outcomes are often decided in fractions of seconds, Verstappen might have just made minutes the new standard. It’s a sad state of affairs for competition when, as the race leader, you’re closer to seeing the back of your rivals than they are to seeing yours. 

And Red Bull’s 2023 car appears miles, and I mean miles figuratively and literally, ahead of the competition. Let’s face it, even Ginger Spice could finish on the podium in a Red Bull. Additionally, Red Bull probably didn’t even show their full hand, mostly because they didn’t need to. 

But, winning all 23 races is expecting too much even for a team like Red Bull that looks like it has no weaknesses whatsoever. They don’t need any luck to win both the driver’s world championship and the constructors’ championship. But Red Bull would need lots of luck to run the table. And for RB not to win every race would require only a single instance of bad luck. And bad luck in F1 can arise from many places, in an instant, often without warning. That one instance of bad luck could be a rogue engine failure, a missed shift on a start, an inexperienced driver who fails to move out of the way, a tire failure, or Mercedes or Ferrari finding lightning in a bottle for just one week. And that’s not even mentioning the weather. A wet race is always a chaotic affair and historically has often resulted in surprise winners. 

If I were a gambler, I would much rather put my money on a non-Red Bull driver winning just one race than on Red Bull winning every race.  

But can Mercedes actually win a race?

I could answer that, but I’ll let the experts do it. That would be Mercedes themselves. George Russell said after the race that he thinks Red Bull “should” win every race this year. This was just a few days after Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff said…