Lewis Hamilton has given his take on claims that F1 has got boring because of Red Bull’s dominance this season.
The 2023 campaign has been all about the team from Milton Keynes so far, with them winning all five grands prix up to this point and also the Sprint race that was held over the Azerbaijan GP weekend.
Max Verstappen is leading the championship standings, with three races wins to his name, and team-mate Sergio Perez looks like the only driver with the tools available to him to try and stop the Dutchman making it three championship wins in a row.
Indeed, the likes of Ferrari, Aston Martin, and Hamilton’s team, Mercedes, are currently squabbling for best of the rest and all of them, as well as the neutrals watching on, are desperate to reel in the Bulls.
Hamilton, of course, is keener than most with him still searching for that record-breaking eighth world title and, because of the work he is putting in to achieve a return to the front, he says from a personal point of view he is far from bored.
He can, however, understand why some might be finding it that way with results currently fairly predictable in terms of who is going to be taking victory:
“I’m challenged every single day to get back to the front, so it’s definitely not boring from my perspective,” said Hamilton.
“But as a racing fan watching, I can understand because there’s not as much competition as there perhaps is in the NFL or the NBA at the moment.
“That’s not my doing. As a sport they have already tried to bring the teams closer but it never seems to work. All I can say is that we’re working as hard as we can to close up and get back and give them more of a fight.”
New regulations were brought in at the start of 2022 with a view to eventually bringing the field closer together and whilst the midfield battle is certainly tightly-fought at the moment, up at the front there is a large gap that Red Bull have built.
You have to give them immense credit, of course, as they have done some brilliant work to be leading as they are and Adrian Newey and his team have created the benchmark in this latest era of F1.
It just remains to be seen, then, how long it takes the chasing pack to get on level terms with them.
