Red Bull Racing may have ended up cruising to last year’s title double, but we still had so many reasons to hope that the 2023 season could have been more competitive.

Ferrari lacked reliability and Mercedes lacked aero stability, but both seemed sure that they were on the path to success for 2021.

Instead we’re five races in and the reigning constructors champion has swept the board, winning every race and establishing a 122-point lead — and that’s over surprise frontrunner Aston Martin. Mercedes and Ferrari are further adrift.

There’s been no real competition for victory at any round so far, and after five weekends of trying to be modest, Christian Horner adopted a new tack after another one-two victory in Miami.

“Five races, five wins, plus the sprint, four one-two finishes,” the Red Bull Racing principal told Sky Sports. “We’ve never ever had a start like this, and we’re kind of wondering: where are the others?

“We’ve made a normal step, what we would think over the winter. It’s more: where did Ferrari and Mercedes go?”.

Horner’s team can only beat what’s in front of them. If no-one turns up for the fight, it’s hardly his fault that the championship moves rapidly in one direction.

But is he right to say the one-sided nature of the season is down to the failure of his rivals rather than his own team nailing the second season of the regulations?

The numbers don’t bear that out, at least at first glance.

The easiest way to quantify development is by looking at one-lap pace in qualifying and how far off pole position each car is. The following numbers demonstrate how much each team has improved this year compared to the last five races of 2022.

The teams are arranged based on their pure qualifying speed so far this year.

Red Bull Racing: 0.12 per cent improvement

Ferrari: 0.32 per cent improvement (0.2 per cent better than RBR)

Aston Martin: 1.00 per cent improvement (0.88 per cent better than RBR)

Mercedes: 0.20 per cent improvement (0.08 per cent better than RBR)

Alpine: 0.04 per cent improvement (0.08 per cent worse than RBR)

Looking at the above numbers, Ferrari and Mercedes are in fact two of the most progressive teams this season relative to their form at the end of 2022.

True, the numbers are skewed slightly by the fact that Red Bull Racing had less to gain relative to pole position given it was already the benchmark, but it’s nonetheless the case that both Ferrari and Mercedes have been closer this season than they were late last season.

In fact it’s in these numbers that we can see the entire frontrunning group — Aston Martin included — has managed to break away from the midfield. Whereas last year Mercedes was occasionally vulnerable to either Alpine or McLaren, there’s no real sign of that in 2023, at least on one-lap pace.

So how does that tally with the sinking feeling that Red Bull Racing is running away with the season?

It’s all about perception.

You might still think of last year as being one defined by Ferrari being extremely quick but unreliable — of the Italian team offering a title challenge but being undone by dodgy engines.

That was only really true in the first half of the season.

The second half of the year was all one-way traffic.

In the last 11 races of 2022 RBR took five poles and 10 victories. The 2023 campaign is very much a continuation of what we were already seeing last season.

RACE PACE TELLS A DIFFERENT STORY

That said, things have certainly escalated this year, and we can see that in race pace, where there’s now no real competition to the RB19.

Average best finishing position, 2023

Red Bull Racing: 1.0 (last five races of last season: 2.0)

Aston Martin: 3.2 (last season: 9.2)

Mercedes: 4.2 (last season: 3.0)

Ferrari: 6.0; although 4.4 without Sainz’s Australia penalty (last season: 3.2)

Alpine: 10.4 (last season: 6.2)

The above numbers tell us what we see in the championship standings and what we instinctively know: that Red Bull Racing is clearly fastest on Sundays, Aston Martin comes next and then Mercedes and Ferrari are battling for third.

But it’s relative to last year’s numbers where Red Bull Racing’s gains are most obvious.

Late in 2022 Red Bull Racing was averaging a second-place finish about one position ahead of Mercedes and Ferrari. That means the three teams were close enough that they were sharing the podium places and even rotating through the top spots.

This year, however, Red Bull Racing is on average more than two places ahead of everyone else. The car is quick enough that the team’s other driver is guaranteed to finish second in regular circumstances.

Whereas last year Sergio Pérez was often vulnerable to being picked off for second place, this year he’s just too far up the road to be a target.

The battle between Aston Martin, Mercedes and Ferrari is closer and more like last year’s frontrunning fight.

Meanwhile, Alpine is barely getting a look-in at the points given the top eight is normally locked out, again emphasising how much further ahead the leaders are this year.

Red Bull Racing’s step forward on Sunday has been substantial despite what ought to have been decent gains by rivals year on year.

SO WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO MERCEDES AND FERRARI?

Ironically the seeds of Red Bull Racing’s domination were sown with its penalty for breaching the budget cap.

You might somewhat cynically say the budget overspend itself has flowed to the RB19’s success. Certainly Ferrari boss Frédéric Vasseur has suggested as much.

But all we know for certain is that from the moment the team was slapped with a 10 per cent reduction in development time, the strategy has been to maximise the race pace of this year’s car at the expense of qualifying performance.

The logic behind it was that the team wanted to be able to ensure it could pick up regular points in the event the development cap really hurt it. It would then hope to eventually improve its qualifying speed with what wind tunnel time was left available to it.

Except it’s turned out that even the baseline package is quick enough to beat everyone else, so what we’ve ended up with is a strong Saturday car but an absolutely dominant Sunday machine.

Those gains have been helped by both Ferrari and Mercedes appearing to hit a ceiling on the development of their respective philosophies.

Mercedes has admitted as much, having understood during the off-season that this car was struggling for big gains in the wind tunnel.

The major upgrade package the team is bringing this weekend is the result of that realisation.

Ferrari’s situation is less clear cut. The team is adamant the car concept isn’t the problem and is leaning on the qualifying pace as evidence.

But the fact the fast and docile 2022 machine has become a real handful without getting much quicker suggests finding gains in the SF-23 is also becoming very difficult, which would tally with the suggestion that this development path is less fruitful than the one chosen by Red Bull Racing.

And that is the flip side of the question that asks why Ferrari and Mercedes have failed to offer a genuine challenge to Red Bull Racing this season.

RBR has simply struck the richer vein of development under these regulations. The fact the team is nailing progress despite being hamstrung by reduced development is proof of how much potential exists in the concept.

So in a way Horner is right to ask why neither team has been able to put up a fight — not because they’ve underperformed year on year but because they’ve failed to spot the development pathway that is leading Red Bull Racing further away from them at a faster rate than any of them have anticipated.

Performance in Formula 1 is all relative, and Red Bull Racing is simply doing a better job than everyone else. It’s up to you to decide whether that’s because the team is overperforming or everyone else is underperforming.