A prolonged era of dominance is a real aspect of Formula 1 and those who deny it, let us prove you wrong. In recent times, Red Bull enjoyed a few dominant years from 2010 to 2013. Post-2013, in the hybrid era, Mercedes shone with their machinery, winning seven drivers and eight constructors’ championship titles. This era of dominance by the German team and Lewis Hamilton came to a close once the 2022 regulations were introduced. Red Bull built a vastly superior car to its competitors and Max Verstappen is running rampant with it. Now, Hamilton fears, this will be the case for a long time or until the new regulations change the dynamics.

Hamilton communicated this fear after the Miami GP while speaking to the media, as quoted by Express. “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,” said Hamilton.

“It’s just unfortunate that we still see the same sort of gaps between the teams. I don’t know what the solution is for the future, but we are going to have to adapt to these regulations. Otherwise, it could be the same as it is now for years,” he confessed.

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Verstappen is definitely faster than the rest of the field and by a margin. In fact, some even believe he would be faster in equal machinery. However, that cannot be put to the test because of the poor state of the Mercedes machinery. A car, that not only Hamilton but Mercedes boss Toto Wolff believes is in shambles.

Toto Wolff backs the concerning belief of Lewis Hamilton

Wolff has been advocating the zero pod concept and putting his faith in his engineers from the start of the 2022 season. However, when the team started the 2023 season on the same note as the previous one, the narrative quickly changed. Now no one, including Wolff, is shying away from discrediting the car looking forward to a massive upgrade.

Wolff said, “I think that the car is not a nice car, not a good car. It’s the pace, the performance of the car, it’s the lack of understanding of the car [about why] it is not delivering. It is the full spread of activities. I would say the performance is just really bad. It’s a lack of comprehension of what it is that makes this car such a nasty piece of work.”

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These massive upgrades will be revealed next race weekend in Imola. Will it be enough to bring Mercedes close to Red Bull? No one can know for sure but there are definitely a lot of high expectations riding on the team for the weekend in Imola.