People forget what they wish for. "more reliability" = more predictability. spending cap = underdogs have a chance to win, but when one team gets it really right, other teams can't catch up because... they aren't allowed to spend that much money.

People here talking about the miami gp are missing the point. 1 race is not going to change the fact that dominance has gotten worse in f1. I think that reliability is the biggest factor in domination today. Can you imagine senna and mclaren or williams with today's reliability. But you can't just ignore that, it's part of the dominance factor.

For the Schumi era it has to be noted 2003 was close. Schmi only won by two points and both Williams and Mclaren were very competetive.

I'm somewhere between "you're a Brit and you only suddenly developed a problem with dominance now that it's no longer Lewis doing the dominating", and "you've got a point". 2007-2008 were the best seasons, imo. 3-5 drivers had a chance at the title right up to the last race.

There was a degree of dominance in the early days.... Fangio!

Take 2002 and 2004 out and Schumacher really had to fight for some victorys ! ... conpare this to Mercedes Hybrid era where they won 30 seconds before the 3. Car or so ...

Domination in F1 is now part of the game, for me, a life long F1 fan, it's never been a problem. It's up to the teams that are not winning to raise their game and compete. What has changed F1 more than anything, in my life, is the amount of money being pumped in to teams and the amout of sponcership that has poured in to F1. Todays F1, for me, has changed so much, it has lost it's character of old. To me now F1 is Big Business, Big Sponcerships, TV/Digital deals. in short, my passion for F1 has died, buried it 10 years ago. I watch the highlights every now and again. The "golden days" of competition in F1 are long gone.

Schumacher's dominance overshadowed the fact that both McLaren and Williams are faster. They just both suffered from reliability issues. And during the Ferrari dominance in the early 2000s, you can still see other cars take pole. Lewis' and Max's era basically locked their teams in the front row.

I think the strong limitation and regulation in Car development is really hurting the sport ! Back in the day you had Different Car concepts that where good one some Tracks while now you just have basicly one Car allready "pre-designed" by the regulations

they need to make the cars smaller, bring back v10’s, and not let teams work on cars so early before the season starts

So one team dominance doesn't have to be bad, also long as we get a teammate battle out of it. Most people were more than willing to look past Mercedes initial dominance because we got the battles between Hamilton and Rosberg. The problem is most teams operate on an A-Driver/B-Driver structure, often with the 'upgrades' the cars get as well and who the car is designed around. Sergio Perez is not driving the same car Max Verstappen is in terms of upgrades, also the car he's driving was not built around his abilities, but built around Max's. Perez is only allowed to win races when something goes wrong with Max. It was the same with Barrichello at Ferrari, same with Webber at Red Bull in the 2010's, same with Bottas at Mercedes. I don't know how you necessarily put an end to team orders and team driver preference, but that needs to be sorted out, you need to find a way to encourage teammate battles.

People overlook that it took Max 6 seasons in F1 to become WDC

What’s crazy is that it almost seems that the more regulations and strictness the more a certain team dominates. Look at the 70s and 80s it was FORMULA 1. We had cars with fans, cars with six wheels. It was perfect.

i think crashes shouldn't be included in budget cap cause it happen more often when you're in the middle of the pack than being alone in front.

Mercedes dominated 2014-2020, so I don’t see why red bull dominating for 2 years is worse

I think another big problem is that they sacrificed the quality of tracks for commercialism. Far too many street circuits now in my opinion it isn't meant to be formula E.

It really does not matter what you think. A driver like MV still need to do it. The evidence is in the fact that MV hardly makes any driving mistakes anymore and that he has matured enormously. Where he was driving very impatience and over the limit of the car, he drives now holding back at times, because he learned that you are NOT going to win races as how he did them before.. I would say that he is driving a lot smarter now

Poor Hamilton Fan

When Mercedes was winning they were just smacking people with their wallet. Notice when a spending cap was instituted they immediately became mediocre.

The problem lies with the teams who don't want two drivers to compete - look what happened with Hamilton and Rosberg. Much easier to have a team leader and a 2nd driver and rack up the championships. Dare I suggest that if Bernie was still in control he would be putting pressure on Red Bull to ditch Perez and get someone in who could give Max a race.

You got the solution to dominance, open up the rule book. I can’t speak on the 50-80s. But I know come the 1998 rules the designs got more similar. Ferrari and Bridgestone were a formidable combo, but let’s not forget 2003 and 2000 weren’t easy. But the 2014 regs allowed Merc to run away, same with the 2022 regs. Because the rules are so strict there’s only one sure way of success. Copy the Redbull. If the regs were more free there’d be opportunity to try something different. And the lack of testing as we see doesn’t hinder dominance. It makes it worse.

This aged beautifully, Lando Wins. McLaren genuinely have the fastest car with the upgrades on Lando Norris' car.

The current Red Bull and previous Mercedes dominance do come down to both teams nailing the technical regulations enforced at the time and having the best driver on the grid driving their cars. Obviously the key difference between the two is that for the first three years of Mercedes' dominance, there was a strong inter-team rivalry won 2-1 by Lewis Hamilton over Nico Rosberg, stopped only by Rosberg's decision to retire after winning the 2016 driver's title. I expect Red Bull and Max Verstappen to dominate until the end of next year, despite losing Adrian Newey at the end of this season. I think they will still be near the front of the grid from 2026 but with the next regulation change beginning that year there's another opportunity for a team to nail the new rules. Since 2010 the race wins have been largely dominated by Red Bull, Mercedes and Ferrari, with a handful of other teams winning races, which shows which teams have had the largest budgets in the sport. Even with the budget cap being introduced these three teams still remain the most likely to find the winning formula to dominate.

This has never been different as. far as I recall. Williams - Ferrari - Red Bull and then, 7 Years of Mercedes Dominance broken by RB Dominance. Let's see what the future brings.

i think most people forget that there is simply nothing really comparable to f1. I mean, every team builds their own chassis, theres 4 different engine suppliers and at least 5 different in 2026 and there are no BoP rules. Sure theres less time for wind tunnel testing and CFD simulations when you finish higher up in the constructors championship but thats still vastly different to "normal" BoP regulations. Show me a motorsport series where the racing is closer than in f1, while everyone has to build their own car (no complete spec chassis and no spec engine) and where there is no BoP in the Regulations.

The advantage that Mercedes had over the other teams whilst they were ahead is nowhere near what Red Bull has today, Mercedes was way further up. Nowadays wee see that Hamilton ain't even such an amazing driver, constantly losing to Russel. The field is a lot more bunched up than what is was in the Mercedes era.

I mean during Hamilton domination at least he had some type of competition between Nico and Sebastian

from watching this video i got mixed feelings. Its like people hate teams/drivers that work? You got amazing driver that wins? Booh bad you got team that produce amazing car that noone catch? booh bad again Its like people wants F2 to become F1 everyone same car everyone same things. Where is the team in that? I didnt like much schumacher era only at the end where Alonso started winning. It was sad to watch how so good driver is desperate to win trying to sabotage race (2006 Monaco btw ) I hated Merc era cause that was ,,we have unlimited money, sucks to be you who dont" They could make best car as they dreamed for to win every year with almost no competition Now we have Max era. What we got? Every year equal chances. Teams can spends same money on making new car. So its up to driver to deliver points and on team to make great car that will work. RB got it perfect since 2021 even with budget cap (now im not sure if it was in 2021 already or 2022 you can tell me in comments ) people are mad cause Perez is not on par to Max... i mean be grateful? That means that is not only car thats great but must be driver too. It only shows that Max is actually beast behind wheel. his whole freetime he spends by driving in simulator to be in every race best as he can you surely saw photos from Saudia arabia or Monaco where he litteraly touch the wall with wheel how close he gets to put out maximum. Thats why i like how it is now and rly wanna see 2026 changes, whos gonna be best. Anyone can get it and its gonna be fun to watch

Car needs to be lighter, and simpler. Simpler car means a highly restricted car in term of design. Of course not to the point it becomes spec series, and also not one regulation that favor only one team. Current cars are in favor of RB, where they are just better in ground effect compared to any other teams thanks to a certain man. I think they should bring back bargeboard while keeping the ground effect rule, and restrict both heavily. This may lead to car that doesn't generate too much dirty air and provide closer racing.

The Williams era only shows they had the best car on the grid, domination once again.

There is no silver bullet to solve F1 dominance, but there is a silver buckshot, which is looser rules. I think you said it best here: 19:50 Some regulations are good. Necessary even when talking about safety. But make rules overly tight and restrictive and, yeah, only a few can shine.

I accept that domination is a part of motorsport. It's a sport not an entertainment show where every race has to have a different winner every year. If you don't have the best car and driver combo you'll just be a Williams.

I've followed F1 for 50 years now and I can barely watch any more. I struggled through the Schumacher and Hamilton eras but the Verstappen dominance is a step above. At least when Schumacher and Hamilton were dominating there was a chance of someone else winning, even if it came down to engine failure. Worse still, I find the likes of Crofty trying to sell a dying horse unbearable. I know what good competive racing is and I know when someone is trying to polish a turd. At least there are always old Goodwood videos to re-watch.

Imagine if this road the car is driving down in the video is a time machine highway that lead back to the 80s. Destination 1985. I'm in.

The real problem is rule changes. The last 3 periods of dominance came after a rule change, and ironically before them we had some of the best seasons. 2008 was amazing, 2013 would've been brutal too if it wasn't for the mid season tyre change and 2021 is probably the best season in F1 history. They just keep changing it when it's getting good

Length-wise: Hamilton's W11 dominance was the worst, but at least in some circuits and quali sessions we saw Ferrari and RB fight back. When it comes to unrivaled performance on GP weekends, Max and the RB21 are just in a different stratosphere. The RB car is dominating every single metric without any opposition. Mercedes, McLaren, and Ferrari all look like clowns at the moment.

Smh hard for me to believe people learn more from Christian Horner about making excuses not to judge max, whereas people like Jean Todt and Ron Dennis are being laughed at, Toto on the other hand made a fool of himself at abu dhabi.

And no... The solution is not for driver to have more equal cars, if you want a sport like that, you have the feeder series and Indycar, it's not like F1 is the only open wheel series in the world

Tbh the Ferrari era was great because Bridgestone used to make tyres totally different than Michelin, so in some period of races, Ferrari were behind and someone new was leading. I found really entertaining the 2002-2004 era, those cars had potential

Mercedes section feels a little targeted. Merc didn't begin building the engine that we ended up with, they built a smaller, less cylinder concept and then extrapolated that into the final confirmed regulations. All you've done here is back the claims that they knew the exact engine regs before 2014 (the 2014 regs, not the year as a date) despite that being commonly agreed upon as false as their intentions for the regs were different to what was actually chosen. The budget thing is also wrong.RB and Ferrari had seasons where they spent more. The worst thing about the current situation is that we're living through the most restrictive regulations we've ever had. A budget cap, an engine freeze and an aero ceiling. There is so little room for development. Some teams have managed to develop well, but they'll hit a ceiling. AM did last year. McLaren won't challenge RB. They simple don't have the money left within the budget to match RB who don't have spent as much of their budget to get to where they are currently, so they can theoretically spend what's left and move further away.

F1 needs to make minor aerodynamic changes every season to spice things up.

The development cost for the Mercedes hybrid engine was over 1 Billion dollars. The crime was that the FIA allowed Mercedes to successfully lobby for the engine design that they'd spent most of a decade designing. That the Merc engine was SO DOMINANT is proven in the fact that customer team Williams was able to lock down P3 in constructors in 2014 with their usual tractor chassis and the Merc rocketship engine.

me watching this right after norris wins miami ahead of verstappen....

posted this right before lando won this aged amazingly

no one mentions the performance average of Newey's cars from 92 till now

The bigg biggg difference now and back then is MAX without him perez needs to fight to get WDC . and btw how long did it take for max to get where he is at now . I see art become perfection to bad others fail to see that

....it takes WAY more than a "couple of months" to build an F1 car.

I genuinely believe that explaining the problem to people is often pointless as many are either dumb or are unwilling to accept differing opinions don't u think its funny how one team wins a race by such unreal margins that their cars are scarcely featured on the broadcast, only seen at the start, during a pit stop, and at the race's end? It feels almost like watching an autonomous race, devoid of real competition or controversy more over certain tracks, like Miami, seem to discourage overtaking, unlike the battles we witnessed in earlier eras. I believe that a combination of driver skill, car performance, and a bit of luck traditionally led to more evenly matched and exciting races.

If competition has shortcomings... Then it's not the leading manufacturer or drivers issue that his competition is not upto the mark. The field is fixed everyone has the same budget to build a car so better give credit to whomsoever does it better.

If you look superficially at the races, please look at the times the drivers finished the races, the distances were huge from a third to a 4th, and so on, that's why we remember exceptions like Velleneve's clash with a renalt, why are we we remember, because other than this, we have almost no, if not any, memory of other fierce disputes like these, that is, your vision is very romanticized of things. Look at the result of the grand prix in Spain 1990, you will see that only from second to sixth did they follow the same lap as the leader, from seventh to bottom everyone took a lap! Welcome to the real F1, where the best wins, and today it's even better. It's not just about who wins, it's about whether the race was good or not. So people remember good races, who remembers bad races? In a few years, people will only remember the Dutch GP, the Monza GP, the Singapore GP in 2024, and that's normal, but it blinds people, making them only remember the good, not the bad.

The problem is the ticket system or how they call it, so if u nail the regulations u can dominate for the upcoming years cause other teams cant catch u up...

And in the 70's the death rate was so high that potential championships were killed off. RIP Jochen Rindt

You suggest the idea of a tire war, but if I may paraphrase one Dave Despain, nobody wins a tire war, and everybody loses.

perfection in reliability is also a big issue for drama.

so the problem is Max Verstappen beeing probably the best F1 driver in history...

I mean, early days of F1 definitely had a lot of winners and champions but i dont think modern fans would find them that exciting. In the 50s you had 2 years where Ferrari were unbeatable, then 2 years when Mercedes were unbeatable. And so on. The Merc in mid 50s was laps ahead of any other car, relatively reliable for the time and would've continued to dominate if not for the Le Mans disaster. There wasn't exactly a lot of racing in the era, and drivers would regularly win by a whole minute or more. The peak of F1 competitiveness was definitely the DFV era from mid 60s to early 80s when almost every team ran the same engine and small teams could turn up and win races. Another factor in the more unpredictable seasons in the 60s to 80s era is that tragically, drivers would die in races very regularly. The 90s and 00s definitely are where it starts to go wrong, but the period since 2013 has been just the worst.

nowadays f1 team understand that it's better to ony hire 1 exceptional driver, so we will never have again incredible team fight such as senna/prost, or alonso/hamilton.

I was a Senna fan during the Senna/Prost years, so I was thrilled even when it was all McLaren winning. I was a Schumi fan, and loved that era. I was a Seb Vettel fan during the early years of the hybrid era, and I didn't really care if it was Hamilton or Rosberg winning. For non-Mercedes fans, it mostly didn't matter. If Checo wins the title this season, I imagine the RBR haters will be less _unhappy_ but they won't really be happy. That's how most of the Mercedes/Hamilton era was for the non Merc fans.

That watch would be the greatest purchase of my life if it wasn't so expensive

id argue its only annoying if the car is dominant and i dont think this red bull is as dominant as the merc from the last era. Max is just a machine most weekends.

Thats quite interesting.. Schumacher had endless funds Hamilton half a billion and max has the budget cap. Well done RB

We need F0, where there are no regs!

lando has done it 🔥‼️ expect more from mclaren and ferrari to challenge max’s dominance

The biggest difference between now and Schumacher era is the cost cap. You used to be able to out spend your way to be faster or catch up, now you're stuck as everyone develope at more or less the same rate

F1 racing times between drivers is closer now, it's just that one driver is consistently outperforming others. Look at overall timings post 2014-2020. Overtaking this reg could have been better had Mercedes not lobbied to raise ride height of the cars.

19:50 The problem with this idea is that depending on what's being "opened up", nowadays experimentation usually leads to failure since we know pretty much what the best setup is. That's why in 2000 the "3.0L engine with a max of 12 cylinders" rule was changed to "only 3.0L V10's allowed". Because the ideal configuration for such a high-revving 3.0L engine is a V10. Also look at WEC and see Nissan's attempt at a front-engined car, and more recently Peugeot's attempt at a rear-wing-less car. They tried to go against the grain and failed, because unless the regulations make a traditional mid-engined, winged car unfeasible, that is the ideal design. So, you need to be very careful with how you relax the rules. Currently ground-effect aero appears to be the single dominant feature of F1 cars, and if you can get that right you're gonna have a great car. And before that it was the hybrid system that Mercedes had a head-start developing. We need to avoid this sort of thing. All possible exploits across all aspects of the car need to be balanced, without creating possibilities for wacky "out of the box" ideas that turn out to be dead-ends.

It's not driver dominance, it's car dominance. Senna, Schumacher, Hamilton, Verstappen = McLaren, Ferrari, Mercedes, Red Bull. And yes, some of those drivers won in different cars, but they weren't dominant in them.

Solutions: Move top scoring driver from the top scoring team to the worst team and the top scoring driver from worst scoring team to the top scoring team. Alternatively homologate the cars (Indy car is partially homologated and it doesn’t have that dominance problem).

McLaren's 1988 dominance lasted just 1 season - it didnt drone on for 8 years like Mercedes's dominanance. And even in 88 the top car was shared between 2 all time greats so it was good anyway - not like Hamilton having C grade teammates.

Absolutely stunning timing on this one mate. LOL

Great video. I recently found you and have been binge watching you lmao

When they change the regulations the comparison issue easily pops up, and its unbearable especially coming from team LH lol

While not a lengthy period of domination by modern standards, you have to mention Jim Clark. He did win pretty much everything in 1963 and 1965, and could have four or five championships if Lotus was just slightly more reliable.

17:17 it's that TRON LEGACY MUSIC?

Newey mentionned but it wasn't mentionned how a large portion of championship winning cars are Newey's design. From 90s Williams + McLaren, Vettel's and now Max's. From 1992 to 2023, Newey's designed car won 45% of driver/constructor championships.

It is not the Driver but instead it is a Constructor Dominance.

New fans should watch the 2012 season with regards to a good driver 1 point decided the championship in a shitbox/donkey of a car I don’t even like the guy after 2007 season but his skill got the most and more out of it

I like your videos a lot and my only feedback is the way you say “Tifosi”, you pronounce it like Tifossi while it should be Ti-fooh-si 👍

9:30 Rising Phoenix is the name of the song

Simple solution. Watch Indycar,IMSA or WEC.

That 98T watch was incredibly tempting... Until I saw the $3200 price tag.

So the only reason to watch F1 is who wins? Wow. what a super fan.

Why the hell isn't Sebastian in the thumbnail?

The paradox is that the gap between the front and the back of the field keeps getting smaller and smaller, which means imo that we need cars that are harder to drive, gather less data on the cars and introduce rules that makes more difficult for teams and drivers to extract consistently the whole potential of the car. However, that would probably make dominance worse in years where a team gets it totally right all the time

'23 took the piss, it just showed how the spending limits don't help the show. I expect Ferrari will be the dominant force on the new regs if they get Newey, but they also have been building on the tech side too.

Dominance of one team happened before, is that now they choose a dominant driver and a less talented one, so races are predictable and boring. We will never see a Prost-Senna duo again.

Keep the aero regs, keep the budget cap, bring in tire war, open the engines to bringing whatever technology they want but limit their fuel storage, bring in Andrett, get rid of the stupid Saturday sprint race.

The current FIA / F1 plan seems to be to allow the 2022 rules to play out until 2026, logic being that the grid will bunch up, then we get competitive racing - it so far hasn't worked. 1) The budget cap limits the ability of other teams to close the gap to Red Bull, eg see Merc. 2) There's generally always been slight changes in the rules in the past to take away an outright advantage that one team has, eg. 1994 Williams, 2003 and 2004 Ferrari, 2017 and 2021 Merc. Without this sort of strategic rule change, Red Bull will probably dominate until end of 2025.

Who’s here after lando won

Solution : Formula 1.5, So it is race of 19 drivers excluding the winner, meaning you watch the race to see who becomes 2nd and call him the formula 1.5 winner/champion. Done this since the Hamilton dominance era and works for me.

Are you going to ignore the 2014 to 2016 token engine freeze which locked in Mercedes advantage? Or the fact they were allowed to refuse to provide max power engine maps to their customers, meaning they could never compete?

I’ve been watching F1 for 30 years & no one’s dominated like max & red bull. I’m getting uninterested in it all, lately the same guy wins everything it’s not even close. Even max must be getting bored.

The tyre war was why Schumacher dominated. He was literally the only driver who was given the spec of tyres that he had. Even hhis teammate didn't have them. This was deliberate from the tyre manufactuerer. They wanted to guarantee one driver winning every time with their brand on his overalls so that it was easy to market him.

This video aged like milk after the Norris win

You just mentioned convenient points. Bro at least check how lewis was doing against the whole grid in all those years if you want to compare dominance. That is the best measure of dominance. The dominance you are talking about (21 of 22) is not dominance, it's consistency. Lapping the whole grid, or driving the car with 3 wheels in the last lap and still winning is dominance.

max's domination is different because everyone behind is super close and regulations tends to be better and better to make teams close together.

The look at the Schumacher years was a bit superficial, imho. It overlooks how ofter Ferrari had come close but failed, making '97-99 such interesting seasons. In 2000, McLaren had the edge but wasn't reliable enough and Ferrari maximized everything. 2001, 2002 and 2004 were indeed dominant, but 2003 was very close and its rule changes were a first failed attempt by F1 to hobble Ferrari by going after its tire strategies. In 2005 F1 went a step further to target Ferrari and banned tire changes entirely, a true "headshot" to their key technical advantage. In 2006, 2007 and 2008, they took the driver's championship to the last race, without Schumacher for the last two but you could see these as extensions of that team. In sum, we are talking 3 dominant seasons, 8 close seasons and 1 uncompetitive season out of 12 years of Brawn/Todt Ferraris. The dull ones were very dull, but the era as a whole was not as bad as some say.

Aged like fine wine

That's why when Lando won, it became more exciting. The fans and also the drivers and the teams loved it tbh

it was still pretty tight in Miami, no 10+ lead but the top 3 cars have a pretty big gap amongst the pack. also bring back v12s and get rid of drs lol