Thrilling second-place battle shows growing threat to Red Bull's F1 reign

So let’s focus on what we have in front of us, and also what it says about F1 at the moment. Across so many different aspects, under Liberty Media’s ownership, the sport has been trying to level the playing field as much as possible and make it partly about the abilities of the people that make up the teams and design and build the cars – rather than the budgets they have — but ever-more about the drivers behind the wheel.

And there are drivers of the highest calibre up and down the grid who just need the machinery to show what they can do. Working from the bottom of the constructors’ championship up, we’ve seen standout performances from Yuki Tsunoda (who now has a multi-time race-winner in the form of Daniel Ricciardo joining him at AlphaTauri), Valtteri Bottas has impressed at Alfa Romeo, while both Kevin Magnussen and Nico Hülkenberg have made headlines in qualifying for Haas over the past 12 months.

After that you get to Alex Albon at Williams, a pair of race-winners in Esteban Ocon and Pierre Gasly at Alpine, Lando Norris and the ever-impressing Oscar Piastri for McLaren… You don’t need me to keep going do you?

That’s also not a slight on the drivers not mentioned given the various different experience levels, but shows how, throughout the 10 teams, there are drivers who have the potential to deliver the biggest results if given the chance. And as the recent races have shown, many of them are starting to get opportunities, at least on an intermittent basis.

The step forward made by Aston Martin over the winter was heralded by the likes of Mercedes as proof that major gains can be made in F1’s new era, but if you take the position that those improvements were made to look all the more significant by Toto Wolff’s team dropping the ball — and the same for Ferrari — as much as anything else, then it is McLaren’s recent surge that is perhaps more encouraging for the direction F1 has been heading in.

Granted, the past two tracks have suited McLaren’s strengths and it will be Hungary that really shows how far the team has progressed with its recent upgrades, but when Ferrari is a distant ninth and tenth — both beaten by Albon don’t forget — at Silverstone, it’s a reminder that circuits that don’t suit teams also really bite.

McLaren is another team that dropped the ball over the winter and admitted as much even before the new car had run on track. Unlike Mercedes – positive on launch day and then horrified to see the margin enjoyed by Red Bull in Bahrain so quickly changing tune – McLaren was downplaying expectations from the moment it unveiled its 2023 car.

And yet the recovery has been clear to see. Even if it isn’t able to fight for best of the rest with any regularity moving forward, from where McLaren was in the opening rounds to the flashes of speed it had already been showing as developments were introduced, there’s definitely an upward trend.

While I fear the budget cap might become a negative story again over the coming weeks and months, as 2022 figures are reported, it has had the impact of making teams far more sustainable businesses and there has become far less of a need for drivers to bring in significant funds. So teams can focus that little bit more on performance, closing the field up by another incremental step.

Facilities and personnel still play a major role on whether the car itself is strong enough to fight for the biggest results, but we’ve also seen a dissemination of technical talent over the past 18 months that is driven not only by hard budgets but also the potential for so many teams to realistically target breaking into the elite in the coming years.

Red Bull might be able to focus on its 2024 car earlier than its rivals given its advantage — if there are major adaptations it wants that can’t be introduced this year — but it remains slightly more restrained by the aerodynamic testing restrictions that reduce development time on a sliding scale, and there is certainly the talent at rival teams to take advantage of those differences moving forward.

The fight for P2 this year has shown it is already happening, and from the ever-growing group behind Red Bull there’s a bigger pool of candidates to be the team to bridge the gap. They’re queuing up, we can only hope one of them breaks through soon.