Anyway, getting back to the topic :
I never used the word 'dominant' in my post, I was not talking about a car's performance relative to competition in any given year (I thought I made it amply clear to you guys) - I am talking about absolute performance tending towards the theoretical limit possible from a regulation cycle. Remember the 'law of diminishing returns' which tends to be asymptotic in nature ? where the next 1% performance is harder to achieve than the previous 1% achieved last year ? (asymptotic) - in that regard, what McLaren has achieved with the McL39 is simply shifting the goalpost to a whole new level, from the RB19 of 2023 (I am not even contesting that the RB19 was the most dominant car in the history of F1 since the current points format began).Emag wrote: ↑11 Nov 2025, 14:03Regarding 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.
So when there is more theoretical performance in the car (the new goalpost), what does it enable in the driver ? It allows the driver to be that much faster, if he has the talent to put the car near it's theoretical limit, with his driving. In other words, if the RB19 scores 95, the McL39 scores 98. It would have been less hard for other teams to 'develop' their car to hit the 94/94.5 and be close to the 95 ; compared to the super-hard task of developing their car to achieve 96/96.5 and still be far away from 98. That's why I said the McL39 is the 'car of the ground effect era' - it has no weakness, not just in relative terms to competition, but in absolute terms relative to the whole 4 years. It's a herculean task for other teams to get near it, and the only way some other car looks faster in a particular GP is because drivers/operations/car-setup has been suboptimal 'using' the McL39, in that particular race.
Absolute performance, is super important, because to the ones who have more of it, they enjoy a nice advantage, as it's that much harder for others to be near 'more absolute performance', given the asymptotic nature of getting near to it. The performance curve is not linear, it's "limit - exponentially decaying" (like DC charging a capacitor) :
present = target (1 - (e^-k))
And calculating 'performance' from the pace of the race leader (in any race) where he doesn't have anyone with 7-8s of him throughout the entire race (apart from the first 10-15 laps where he needs to build this time-buffer) , is fraught with inaccuracy. That's because he has to always be in some kind of management to preserve his tyres, because he doesn't know when there will be a safety car and he can't afford to lose track position for a cheap tyre change, and needs some life left in them for a rolling restart.
. How can anyone know the theoretical limit accurately ? And by performance, I didn't just mean aerodynamic, mechanical, cooling , I also meant tyre life - and look who has spectacularly excelled with tyre temperature management... the McL39 is the pinnacle of this ground effect era. Whether a bunch of people, with infinite resources and time can find 1s worth laptime more, well that's irrelevant since the regulation has come to a close.