'Red Bull won't be as dominant in 2024 with two big rivals' - Lammers

Red Bull will be forced to work harder in 2024 to maintain its advantage over the field, reckons ex-Formula 1 driver Jan Lammers.

The Milton Keynes squad won 21 of 22 races, banking 860 championship points to put in statistically the best season in World Championship history, with Max Verstappen winning 19 of those races in the RB19.

While Red Bull's dominance was strong, the opposition found themselves in a muddle with no team able to extract a sustained challenge from its package - with Lammers highlighting McLaren and Mercedes in particular.

"The team that will realise the most that they have to work hard again next year will probably be Red Bull itself," Lammers exclusively told RacingNews365.

"There they understand very well that these things come out of the blue. You can also see how close it is," he added, before singling out McLaren as perhaps the biggest threat.

"That the team has an awful lot of potential is evident from three things," he described.

"Obviously from their top performances, but also, for example, already from the fact that they announced that they were going to deliver those top performances. That shows how good the correlation is between what is worked out in the wind-tunnel, in CFD and on the track."

Mercedes problems

But while the 1988 Le Mans 24 Hours winner was positive about McLaren, the same could not be said for Mercedes - who has now fumbled two years of the ground effects era.

"I think the progress they made midway through the season showed that they were taking the right countermeasures at that time, which in my view allowed them to tap into the maximum potential of this chassis," he observed.

"The downside after that was that the other teams managed to develop the cars even further.

"Mercedes had at some point reached the maximum possible, I think. And then if you want to develop even further, it goes downhill again. Compare it to a driver who starts overdriving his car, while it can't actually go any faster.

"For next year, therefore, I expect that they can come back very strong. They now know which way to work, and if they have indeed reached the maximum potential of the W14 early, they have also been able to shift the focus completely to 2024 early on.

"Red Bull has found the ideal flow with this shape of the car, then you can't escape the fact that others are also going to seek and find that ideal shape."