RonMexico wrote: ↑11 Nov 2025, 12:59
Ben1980 wrote: ↑11 Nov 2025, 09:33
venkyhere wrote: ↑11 Nov 2025, 09:15
I am not talking about relative performance to competition in a season. I am talking about 'pure car performance' - the McL39 has more performance than RB18 & RB19 - look at the lap records it has broken. It's the best car of the entire ground effect ruleset which is going to end in a months' time.
Nope, not having that. Its probably recency bias. I can't see how anything comes close to a car winning 21/22 races, and smashing it at all tracks. And demolishing the opposition.
I'm not sure anything will come close to that achievement for a long time, if ever.
Those records tend to be set by the best drivers when they are in the fastest car.
It begs the question why certain drivers weren't able to do something similar over the last 12 or so years.
Regarding the previous comment, the pure performance doesn't matter much in my opinion. It's only natural that cars will get faster every year assuming we remain within the same regulation cycle. We don't consider the F2004 one of the most dominant cars of the sport only because the F2004 was the fastest car of its regulation cycle. We consider it dominant because it had no rivals in 2004.
From that perspective, to evaluate how "dominant" a car is, you only look at the relative performance. In the post 2022 era, from the dominant cars, the MCL39 is probably the better car when it comes to how adaptable it is. There hasn't been any race this year that this car wouldn't be able to be on the podium (at the very least) with perfect execution. The RB19 however, is a much better car if you evaluate it by race pace margin. They were beaten often in qualifying in 2023, but on pretty much every race, the car was untouchable come race day. Small courtesy to Mercedes and Ferrari messing up their cars catastrophically in 2023, but that's besides the point. RedBull perfected their 2022 concept and it paid dividends in 2023. RedBull was just on a different level when it came to exploiting the tires to the full potential in 2023.
As for why 2023-like domination hasn't happened in a long time, that's down to a couple of reasons. In the V8 era, although RedBull had things covered for the most part, the competition was a little bit more volatile. In part because Pirelli was new to the sport and the tires were a big factor in performance swings. Having 3-5 pit stops per race will bound to cause fluctuations, so it was way more difficult to remain consistent and win, even if the car was good enough for it. Vettel was "hated" a lot back then and people were calling him a "car merchant", similar to how Lando is being treated right now, but in hindsight, although I was a big Alonso fanboy, Vettel did very good to be as consistent as he was in that era. Yes the car was probably the best, but he did a great job to exploit that car to the best of his abilities.
In the early turbo-hybrid era, the drivers were more than good enough to exploit the potential of the cars I would say and Mercedes had the pace to do it, but they had unlucky incidents and reliability issues that broke long streaks from happening. The Mercedes W05 (2014) in particular, should have won every race in 2014 if we go by pace alone. The pace advantage they had to the next fastest car in 2014 was just ridiculous, almost different racing series. So in a sense, Mercedes was a bit "unlucky" that they did not set unbreakable records with those cars just because they had two drivers who got hyper competitive and aggressive with each-other causing crashes and incidents breaking streaks.
By the time Bottas came along, the performance advantage Mercedes had diminished a bit, so utter domination was not on the table anymore, although you could argue they should have "won more" in 2019 & 2020. Particularly in 2020, because on some races in 2019, Ferrari was kind of impossible to beat.
