14 March 2024 , 08:42
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Despite Red Bull's continued stranglehold on Formula 1, Lando Norris remains against the idea of FIA intervention to slow the defending champions down.
Max Verstappen and his team broke more records last year on the way to the most dominant title successes the sport has ever seen. And the story looks likely to be the same this term after a flawless start from Red Bull again.
Verstappen won the two races held so far by a comfortable margin, with Sergio Perez also starting strongly to finish second on both occasions. As the season progresses, they will be the heavy favourites heading into every single Grand Prix weekend.
It is a bleak scenario for their rivals who, despite their best effort on track and in their factories, have yet to significantly close the gap to F1's irresistible force. But, despite complaints from fans over the lack of competition and some calls for Red Bull to be slowed down, McLaren star Norris believes it wouldn't be right.
He said: "Of course watching, you wish there were more battles at the front. I can't do anything about it. Max is doing a good job, Red Bull is doing a good job. You can't discourage any of that.
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"Is it as exciting as what everyone would like? Absolutely not. But it's the same in any other sport. If someone's doing a better job, they're going to win. So even [in] football if one team is doing much better all the time you can just go, 'Oh, it's boring now, change something.
"In sport, if someone's doing better they deserve it because they've been smarter and cleverer. It's as simple as that, it's all deserved and don't take anything away from it."
Red Bull's strong start to the season has been overshadowed by an off-track power struggle which threatens the future of team principal Christian Horner. But it has yet to affect results and the 50-year-old was pleased to have performed so strongly on two very different track, which gives the team great confidence going forward.
Horner said: "The cars performed brilliantly all weekend and the drivers have done their part to deliver us a second one-two of the season already. I think you can see that the team is operating at an incredibly high level, trackside and back home in Milton Keynes, we've carried that momentum from last year and that is testament to a lot of hard work from everyone.
"The RB20 was an aggressive evolution from the RB19 for us but after a dominant display in Bahrain, we've come to another circuit and it's performed well again. In Melbourne we will have another, very different challenge, so let’s see how we perform. We have started the season in the best possible way we could and the whole team now want to continue this form into the remainder of a very long season."