Max Verstappen says he understands people feeling bored by Red Bull’s domination of Formula 1.
The team and driver have made a dominant start to the 2023 season and are widely expected to retain the championships they won last year. However Verstappen said he would prefer to have more of a fight on his hands as he did in his year-long scrap with Lewis Hamilton in 2021 and to a lesser extent with Charles Leclerc the following year.
“It’s nice sometimes to have good competition,” said Verstappen in Montreal last weekend. “Honestly, I enjoyed of course ’21 but I also enjoyed the way ’22 went. Of course in the beginning we had some reliability issues, the car was a bit heavy, but at one point the car was also really quite dominant at the end.”
Although domination by one team can be a turn-off for some viewers, Verstappen pointed out it has happened many times before in F1.
“I understand of course people get a bit bored if only one team is dominating,” he said. “We’ve seen it also at Mercedes, we’ve seen it with Ferrari in the past, we’ve seen it with Red Bull in the past.
“So for sure I hope that more teams can get together, then at least even if you have a little issue or whatever or you can’t get the set-up fully in 100% then there’s another team to win.”
Verstappen joined Red Bull in 2016, when Mercedes were at the peak of their dominance. He won one of the two races which were not claimed by their drivers that year, but said he never advocated changing the rules to curb their superiority.
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“It’s all about hard work and I appreciated what they were doing,” he insisted. “It was super-impressive at the time, so I never really felt like you had to stop that or anything. It was all about just trying to work harder and try to catch up.”
While Verstappen is likely to remain favourite to win most of if not all this year’s remaining races, he said his urge to compete hasn’t been affected.
“For me there’s probably even more motivation because you know that you have a winning car,” he said. “When you sometimes come to weekends when you are in P5 or whatever is the best – I mean, that’s still very good, but it’s probably less motivating than when you come to a race and you know that you can win.”
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