Max Verstappen says Red Bull rivals 'will get closer' as Christian Horner reflects on 'unicorn year'
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Red Bull won 21 of the 22 Formula 1 grands prix in 2023
Red Bull's Max Verstappen says rival teams are "not stupid" and will close in on the runaway 2023 world champions next season.
Dutch driver Verstappen, 26, and Red Bull put together the most dominant Formula 1 season in history this year.
"The others will improve their cars and get closer to us," said Verstappen.
"I don't think it's that realistic to achieve that win rate again. But that's fine. To already have a season like we've had is insane."
Verstappen won 19 of the 22 races during 2023, with team-mate Sergio Perez taking two of the remaining three. Ferrari's Carlos Sainz - in Singapore - was the only driver not in a Red Bull to win a race.
Three-time world champion Verstappen won a record 85% of the races and led 1,003 laps in the season.
Speaking in an interview for the 5 live F1 review show, he said he believed the fact the rules were staying stable into 2024 would help other teams catch Red Bull.
"The others are not stupid," he said. "They are all learning. Of course, the longer you keep the regulations the same, the closer it will get, because people start to understand which direction they have to develop in.
"Luckily, we hit the ground running really well with the regulations [in 2022], but I definitely expect next year, for sure, all will definitely take a step towards us.
"I don't know which particular team, because if you look at the whole season it has been a bit up and down for everyone except us, so I don't really know in the winter which team is going to make the biggest jump.
"Hopefully, of course, they still stay behind but we'll see in Bahrain."
The 2024 season starts at the Bahrain Grand Prix from 29 February to 2 March, and is scheduled for a record 24 races.
Red Bull team principal Christian Horner echoed Verstappen's opinion, saying: "I'm sure over the next two years we will see a lot, lot closer racing.
"We will not repeat this year. This will go down as a unicorn year, that's for sure."
Horner said Red Bull's engineers were seeing "diminishing returns" in their development as a result of the team hitting on the right design philosophy straight away when new technical rules were introduced for the 2022 season.
He said he expected others to improve as they learned the lessons of Red Bull's success, and because of the sliding scale of aerodynamic restrictions in the rules.
These dictate the most successful team have the least permitted allowance of wind tunnel and computational fluid dynamics time, and the least successful team the most.
Horner was asked why Red Bull would not simply carry on their success into 2024, given they had dominated so convincingly this year and had therefore been able to start work on their new car earlier than other teams.
He replied: "Because there is a reset for the following year and I'm convinced you will see a lot of cars looking like RB19 philosophy.
"We have got up the [development] curve quicker than others but we are seeing diminishing returns and with the lack of wind tunnel time we've had, even though we transitioned early we still had less time in practice than a great many of our opponents so have had to be very frugal and selective."
Can Perez keep his seat for 2025?
Verstappen is under contract to Red Bull until the end of 2028, but Perez has only one year left on his contract.
Horner said the 33-year-old Mexican, who had a difficult season in 2023, needed to improve his qualifying performances to retain his race seat.
Perez had a run of five races in six when he failed to qualify in the top 10, and was outside the top four on the grid for 16 of the 22 races despite driving what statistically was the best F1 car ever built. In Verstappen's 19 wins, Perez finished second only four times.
"It is Checo's seat to lose," he said. "He is our 2024 driver and if he does a great job next year there is no reason we wouldn't extend him into 2025, but it will be purely based on what he achieves over the large part of the season.
"We have options in the wings. There is a lot of interest from outside the team as well, so as long as you're competitive it puts you in a luxury position to just take your time.
"As the field converges, it is inevitable you want your two cars as close together as you can achieve.
"Checo's race pace and racing has been very strong on many occasions, it is his performance in qualifying is probably the area he needs to focus on over the winter, that he's acutely aware of. He's got to up his qualifying average so he is not having to come from so far back."
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