Lewis: no team should dominate for years

[Dare]

This must be a recent comment

https://www.motorsportweek.com/2023/08/19/hamilton-no-f1-team-should-have-the-chance-to-dominate-for-years/?feed_id=39472&fbclid=IwAR

[Jericoke]

Clearly a recent comment lol.

I know I'm a Lewis fangirl, but the Mercedes run wasn't always a 'runaway' championship (sometimes it was).  Rosberg and Hamilton were certainly competitive, Ferrari/Vettel and RBR/Max put up solid fights along the way too.

I'm trying to appreciate 2023 as something special, with RBR sweeping the entire season.  If they were to do it for 8 straight years, yeah, that kills the sport.  2 seasons, it's just the nature of the beast.  I also feel that the FIA has tried to stop a top team from dominating with the 'cost cap', but I feel like that's not working out well.  It's hard for teams with deep pockets to 'course correct', and it takes time for the handicaps that are supposedly in place for winning/cap violations to kick in and really hurt a team's prospects, especially if that team managed to build a technological lead.

Hopefully someone can solve it soon.  My suggestion is that teams are structured as rigidly as the car designs are.  Don't allow RBR to have a better logistics system than Williams (or, more to the point, allow Williams to catch up with RBR) for example.  If you want an enforceable cap, have someone external to the teams handle the money.  I miss the days of F1 teams doing whatever they wanted, but I appreciate that allowing Ferrari to do whatever they wanted would mean 20 straight championships for them, and that would kill the sport faster than RBR having a single unprecedented season.

[Willy]

Any one team dominating for an extended period of time will drive away fans as they get bored watching a procession with the same car(s) out front.
Todays younger fans are more likely to look elsewhere for entertainment sooner than older fans as they have been inundated with fast-paced multimedia and change gears in a heartbeat if they are not being kept entertained.

[lkjohnson1950]

There are already some signs interest in the US is fading. I suppose given the explosive growth over the last few years, there was bound to be at least a leveling off sometime.

[Dare]

I don't know anyone that watches F1 besides me. Most
people I know think F1 and Indycar is the same.

[cosworth151]

I'm sure the Miami and Las Vegas "events" (I can't really call them races) aren't helping at all. Max's total domination actually plays right into that since the race is just a minor sideshow at them.

I'm afraid of what happened to CanAm happening to F1. Those of us who were around for it remember it fondly, but it was really McLaren winning everything followed by Porsche winning everything. That's what eventually killed it.

[Alianora La Canta]

No team should dominate for years is a response to Leclerc saying Red Bull was likely to win all the titles until 2026, thus it is about as recent as it is possible to be. I don't think Leclerc knows why Red Bull's advantage is that impregnable, although short of a sudden interest in reversing certain baked-in FIA-granted advantages, his instinct is correct.

I don't think Hamilton knows why nobody could catch Mercedes either, but his instinct is also correct regarding the current situation. He knows the FIA didn't give Mercedes any thoroughgoing help to do that; it was more the usual "some of this helps you, some of this helps other people" policies. Certainly nobody in the FIA ever admitted to giving Red Bull the title at a time they shouldn't have, which has now happened twice in the Red Bull era by the head of the FIA. I don't regard being given something deliberately and openly pre-granted by the governing body to be anything special.

I'm seeing an increasing number of people enjoying F1 driver-related social media but declining to ever (or ever again) watch a race, because they don't like how the racing is run and in their eyes, the actually entertaining bit would work just as well if this was 20 people karting or doing some other activity together for fun. Maybe more so because they could take the results at face value. There's a reason Max is the only driver to have lost followers and engagement over the course of the last 2 years - his status is the most dependent on conventional sporting success indicators, and these have lost credibility over that timeframe (most obviously but far from only due to Abu Dhabi 2021).

Miami and Las Vegas are basically regarded as further reason to mock the powers-that-be, that already have little in the way credibility because they can't do their #1 job correctly.