Right, first things first, shall we? I am not a Red Bull stooge, I am not a Red Bull fan and quite frankly, I could not care less who wins a Grand Prix. The only thing I care about when reporting on and covering a Grand Prix is that everyone comes back safe and in one piece after the chequered flag from drivers to team members to marshals and fans. That is the only thing anyone who is a motorsport fan should care about. After that, you hope for a good race with lots of potential storylines emerging but as for this driver or that driver winning, I don't care. I have never been a die-hard fan of drivers or teams. Now, the second point you are thinking. "Red Bull cheated by breaking the cost cap." Most of the overspend committed by the team in the 2021 season came through the incorrect application of tax breaks from what was then Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs. Once the FIA investigated, this was reduced off the total, which ended up at about $432,000 USD. This was clumsy of Red Bull to go over the cap, the only one of the 10 teams to do so. It is a perfectly valid argument to make that if nine teams can make the limit, the other one should to do. Christian Horner's insistence that Red Bull did any get any competitive advantage from the overspend was weak - as that was $432,000 that other teams could not have spent. The team got off lightly and a harsher punishment in the Accepted Breach Agreement with the FIA would have been perfectly reasonable. A hefty fine and deduction in wind-tunnel and CFD development was handed out. But if you think Red Bull's dominance this year and the threat of the clean-sweep of race wins is because of this, it is simply not true.
The Newey factor
Is it really any surprise that the team with the Chief Technical Officer who was around CART (now IndyCar) in the 1980s and who wrote his university thesis on the application of ground effects in motorsport has dominated the formula thus far? Nor is it any surprise that the vast majority of team senior technical folk, prior to 2022, had never had any hands-on engineering experience with ground effects, which last featured in F1 in the early 1980s before it was banned. Very simply put, Adrian Newey was the right man at the right time for this particular set of technical regulations. Much like James Allison was before him and Ross Brawn before him, and Patrick Head before him and Gordon Murray before him and Colin Chapman before him. Now, it must be said that the dominance of the RB19 is on a scale rarely seen even by those great Mercedes, Ferrari, Williams or Lotus machines. At least once a season, there would be some sort of chink the armour or a team mistake to allow someone to steal a win. The closest anyone has ever come to the clean-sweep was in 1988 when McLaren's iconic MP4-4 won 15 of the 16 races in the hands of Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost. The missing race was the Italian Grand Prix where Honda engine trouble put Prost out while Senna clumsily collided with Williams stand-in Jean-Louis Schlesser, putting him out. This handed Ferrari a one-two with Gerhard Berger and Michelle Alboreto just weeks after the death of Enzo... The MP4-4 is lauded as the greatest F1 car of them all owing to the fact it got closer to invincibility than any other machine ever has. There is the Mercedes W11 (2020), Red Bull's RB18 (2022), Ferrari F2004 and the Williams FW14B (1992), but they were all defeated. The RB19 has the chance to sweep the season.
The sweep would be memorable
No matter what is thrown at it or Red Bull, the RB19 has passed every test with flying colours. If Max Verstappen - the latest 'man to beat' in the lineage of Fangio, Clark, Stewart, Lauda, Prost, Senna, Schumacher and Hamilton - was going to lose a race in 2023, it would have been the crazy Dutch Grand Prix where Mother Nature threw everything it had at the champion, who smiled and kept on coming. If, and it is becoming an ever-more increasingly likely if, Red Bull do sweep the season - it would be more of a surprise if it didn't at this point - it would be a good thing. This level of dominance has to count for something. As we all sat through the summer domination - Verstappen was unbeaten in Europe - it has to be for something. Say the team is beaten, the RB19 would just become a modern-day version of the MP4-4, forever suffixed by XX wins out of 22 races as the McLaren is with its 15 from 16. On the other hand, there is an opportunity for the greatest car of all-time debate to firmly be closed. If the RB19 does prove invincible, it would easily eclipse any of the great cars that have gone before it. It would be an incredible achievement, one to look back on in years to come as the 'year Red Bull won every race'. You could even say it would look good on Wikipedia...
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