Max Verstappen has conceded his utterly dominant Red Bull team could win every Formula One race this season. The world champion has previously steered away from acknowledging the likelihood of completing a first clean sweep of F1 wins, but with six consecutive victories this year he has said the team look all but unbeatable on pure pace.
Verstappen and Red Bull have demonstrated their car’s strengths across the full gamut of circuits and, with a win in the rain at the last round in Monaco, in a range of weather conditions. As things stand they cannot be matched in race pace by their nearest challengers, Aston Martin and Ferrari, with Mercedes still some way off.
The world champion has previously been circumspect but has now said they could complete a clean sweep, despite highlighting the caveats.
“How it looks at the moment, I think we can,” Verstappen said as he prepared for this weekend’s Spanish Grand Prix, which is round seven of 22. “But that is very unlikely to happen, there are always things that can go wrong or a retirement or whatever but purely on pace at the moment it looks like [it’s possible]. But we will always get to tracks where it doesn’t work out, or bad luck in qualifying and you make your own mistakes.”
Lewis Hamilton, who won several of his seven titles in a then dominant Mercedes, emphasised that with the right car a driver has all the advantages that they can exploit, unlike when struggling with a car that is as off the pace as his Mercedes.
“Is [repeatedly winning] difficult? No, it gets easier once you get used to it,” he said. “It’s just once you get on top of the car and you know the car works in this window and it is easier to get that set up. When you have performance in hand you are not necessarily having to make risky choices in practice to get an extra half a tenth. You don’t have to push the bodywork as tight as possible, to be on the limit of temperatures, you have breathing space. You don’t have to push the tyres so hard so you can lift and coast a little bit more which means longer stints, there are all these different things that compound and the more you practice the easier it gets.
“But you still have a job to do, you still have to go out and deliver to be focused and not make mistakes and make the right decisions, and that comes with a lot of pressure. For me it was easy to stay focused on the job in hand, the things I could control which was my performance and make sure the team was always pushing forward, I never tired of it and I never got comfortable. But man, it’s a great feeling when you know you have a car you can compete with.”
Verstappen has shown few signs of weakness this season and the Red Bull’s reliability has increasingly looked bulletproof. Last year Verstappen took 15 wins on his way to a championship victory sealed with four rounds still to go. This year he has four from six and the car is even more dominant. His teammate, Sergio Pérez, has two victories but after failing to score points in Monaco he already trails Verstappen by 39 points.
However Verstappen denied that a period of dominance for a team or driver was necessarily off-putting for fans. “On dominance, we have always seen this in Formula One, it is nothing new,” he added. “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 two years where there are two or potentially a third team fighting although when you look at the 80s, 90s, the 2000s early 2010s it has been pure dominance of certain teams.”