I refuse to believe Charles’ race engineer has a job, every time I hear him speak

I don’t necessarily agree with the perspective that Redbull dominating is bad for the health of the sport.

Sure, lack of competition for 1st may drive away some fans. But if the conditions that allowed Redbull to become dominant (i.e., engineering/design freedom) didn’t exist then F1 would no longer be F1. That design freedom attracts many fans, and is what enables all the recent excitement down-grid.

I think few people would care if everyone had equal cars, yet one team was able to consistently dominate due to driver talent. The opposite should also be true if one team is able to dominate due to engineering talent (granted there is more to RBs success than only engineering).

As a Mercedes fan you had 7 pretty decent years.

They are: their car is just a dog in the actual race. From a pure qualifying pace POV they are a lot better, with hulkenberg being able to get the car into q3 quite consistently.
That’s also what makes them seem better than they really are: hulk qualifying in p8 (great) and then tumbles down to p16 by the end of the race (usually because they have to stop more often or at least to worse tires since their tire deg is abismal)

This year we have 4 to 5 competent teams at the top each race. The other teams are just fighting for scraps this season. Just look at the points distribution it’s more skewed towards the top 5 teams compared to last year. Even when cars are much closer to each other during qualifying the bottom teams just can’t cross that gap during race day since two midfielders have leapfrogged the rest of F1.5

They often seem to qualify unexpectedly well which makes you think they’ve got the pace, but on Sunday it invariably turns out that no, they do not have the pace.

Most likely the result of internal struggles after the painful clown show last year.