"How long is this Red Bull era going to last? I predict to the end of 2025"

"How long is this Red Bull era going to last? I predict to the end of 2025. I really can’t see it." Clarkson is adamant in the F1 Nation Podcast . "It will close up when you get more stability that always happens. But such is their advantage now that the gap to the likes of Mercedes and now Ferrari."

Red Bull is hugely ahead

At the start of this season, it looked like we would get as exciting a title fight as we did in 2021 between Mercedes and Red Bull, but during the year it has become clear that the RB18 is several dashes ahead of the F1-75. Ferrari maybe just a little faster in qualifying, but it cannot match Red Bull's speed on Sundays, partly due to tyre management issues.

Clarkson stresses that the gap with Red Bull is huge. "The gap they would have to close up is so huge over the winter. That Adrian Newey and his team at Red Bull have only go to do an incremental improvement to still be light years ahead at the start of next year," said the presenter of Formula 1's official podcast.

Leading thanks to Red Bull or Verstappen?

Nathalie Pinkham, present as a guest, suggests that it may be purely to the credit of Max Verstappen that the lead over Ferrari is/seems so immense. Clarkson, however, disagrees. He argues that Charles Leclerc's pole position at Monza was solely due to the use of a very narrow rear wing. "And as a result predictably they went backwards in the race cause they used the tyres a bit too much."

He continued: "So I think actually there is a huge car performance advantage in the Red Bull. That is allowing Max to look so confident and so supreme isn’t it in that everyone says that ‘oh max is a very different driver to last year’ and he absolutely is and prior to the Italian Grand Prix. He was telling us he doesn’t need to this race and he was bang on right. He didn’t need to win it but I think when you have such a car advantage. It allows you to be a little bit more circumspect.”