Former Mercedes Chief Strategist and current Williams Team Principal, James Vowles, predicts that it will be "very tough" for Red Bull to win every race in the 2023 season. Red Bull continued their dominant form into 2023 by finishing nearly 40 seconds ahead of the nearest challenger, which left rivals convinced they could win every race this season. But Vowles believes the gap to Red Bull should close up over the course of the season, pointing towards the sliding scale aero testing rules in Formula 1 that are designed to close things up. "Do I think Red Bull will dominant the first part of the season? No, I doubt it. I think you'll see Ferrari will be a lot closer to them here [Jeddah] and it will be at tracks like Silverstone, Barcelona, where Mercedes will be mighty as a result of what I know of that package," he told media, including RacingNews365.com . "On balance across the season do I think they're the fastest? Yes, but they still have a wind tunnel deficit. It's not as big as I think it necessarily should be to balance things out, but it's still there. "It will still mean across the season that you'll see other people moving towards them. And with the rules carrying over to next year, you have to keep developing this class, so things will close up."
Vowles: If you stand still, you get caught up quickly
No team has managed to eclipse the record set by McLaren in 1988 with the MP4-4, which won 15 out of the 16 races that season. Mercedes came close with the W07 in 2016 by winning 19 out of the 21 races, while the closest Red Bull have come was last year with 17 wins out of 22 with the RB18. But given the complex reliability and rate of development in F1, Vowles says that it will be tough for any team to pull off a 100% win record feat. "In the winter, you could make just one or two key decisions and you completely screw up the following year," he explains. "If you look at dominance across areas, it's across regulation change. The reason why is a) you can't invest properly and b) instead of having a few decisions, you have too many decisions and you screw them up. Simple as that. "The next bit is when you're fast, you don't want to change. If you get caught into that, I promise you, your rivals will be changing all the time. And what you did yesterday is not good enough tomorrow. "As a result of that, you can stand still and be caught up very quickly. It is very difficult to stay at that level for as long as Mercedes did. If Red Bull are there or if they keep going, it'll be an incredible achievement to do it."
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