How do you beat a team like Red Bull? That’s the question facing Mercedes, Ferrari, McLaren and Aston Martin this season, and the one Formula One desperately hopes will be answered in order to inject some excitement back into its championship after two dominant championship victories for Max Verstappen.
Red Bull won 21 of 22 races in 2023, and in Verstappen’s hands the all-conquering RB19 rarely looked under threat. Based on the results of the past two seasons, the current set of technical regulations, which were introduced in 2022 and will run until the end of 2025, appear to belong to Red Bull, just as the previous sets dating to 2014 belonged to Mercedes and the early 2000s belonged to Ferrari.
There is hope for Red Bull’s rivals, though. Although the reigning champions extended their advantage from 2022 to 2023, the rest of the field began to bunch up behind them, and there’s a belief that the stable regulations from 2023 to 2024 could allow the leading edge of that group to envelop Red Bull.
It might sound like wishful thinking given that Red Bull shifted its focus from 2023 to 2024 relatively early in its campaign last season in order to focus on another big step this year, but some rival engineers believe the law of diminishing returns could apply to Red Bull’s progress. If they’re right, development of this year’s RB20 could plateau while those behind are still making big gains.
Speaking at the end of the 2023 season, Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff likened catching Red Bull in 2024 to the challenge of climbing Mount Everest. While the evocative language was undoubtedly meant to underline the difficulty his team faces, the success rate of climbing the world’s highest mountain has hovered around 60% for the past two decades. Put simply, with the right preparation and favourable conditions, it is doable.
Below, we analyse Red Bull’s four closest rivals and the reasons for optimism for each one ahead of the new season.
Mercedes
Once F1’s most dominant team, Mercedes has been knocked off its perch since the introduction of new technical regulations in 2022. The rules, which were designed to encourage exciting racing, put added emphasis on generating downforce by using air flowing underneath the…
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