[neor]

Mercedes dominating isn't because Newey lost his touch. The Red Bull cars have been in the top three for all those seasons.

The thing is, especially early on in the V6T Hybrid era the Mercedes engine was miles ahead of everyone else. There was simply no other engine capable of winning championships.

The first few years Mercedes was running the engines downtuned to lose some performance, because they felt the gap so huge that it would make the sport look bad if they were running a second a lap faster than the second team on the grid. With such a gap the FIA would also surely intervene fast. Artificially keeping the gap smaller, and only turning up the engine when needed gave Mercedes easy wins, while keeping the FIA away from intervention.

The fights became closer when the other manufacturers started getting more performance out of their engines.

Last year Red Bull won because the FIA changed some aerodynamic rules. Everyone expected that the changed rules would favor Mercedes and Aston Martin who were running low rake. It turns out the expectations were false, the new rules impacted Mercedes and Aston Martin hugely and the teams running a high-rake setup didn't lose all that much performance. This gave Red Bull a edge which lasted until around Silverstone, when Mercedes brought upgrades to fix the performance of their car.

The championship lead built by Red Bull was just enough to win the title in the end with some controversy in the final two races. There never were rumors of cheating anywhere.

[rkangel]

> early on in the V6T Hybrid era the Mercedes engine was miles ahead of everyone else

The Merc engine was definitely ahead of everyone through this period but there is the belief that their chassis was also class leading and that they played up the engine stuff so that people wouldn't pay so much attention to it.

[hef19898]

One impressive thing RBR did was staying competitive after switching to Honda engines. Anyone remember the ridicule Honda got when they supplied McLaren?

[Cymrukicks]

If you don't think there were rumors of cheating you clearly don't watch the sport. The rumors and accusations are pretty much part and parcel of the sport and always have been. It's the Spiderman meme with team principals mouthing of to the FIA and the media in the battle to get an edge.

>The championship lead built by Red Bull was just enough to win the title in the end with some controversy in the final two races. There never were rumors of cheating anywhere.

Sorry but Hamilton was ahead going into the last race and Max won because of Masi's decision making. To deny the rumours of cheating when pretty much every driver came out and spoke against it is very strange.

[steve_gh]

The last race had some truly horrendous decision making by the race director, which led to Verstappen / RBR being gifted the race.

That is very different to cheating. There is no question that Verstappen raced well, and was within the rules. He did not cheat.

Whether the last race ended with a fair outcome is questionable, but if not, the fault lay with the race director, not Verstappen and RBR

[neor]

Cheating is when teams are running illegal cars for example, strong rumors existed around the Schumacher championships with Benetton that they were illegally using Traction Control to boost performance.

More recently Ferrari finding a way to circumvent the FIA provided fuel flow sensor allowing them to push more fuel into the engine than allowed.

That's cheating, and no huge problems like that existed last year. Sure there were the usual things. Aerodynamic parts flexing, not proved to be illegal as it passed all FIA mandated tests. It leads to a new Technical Directive in which the FIA reminds teams that aerodynamic parts shouldn't flex and that the FIA is improving the tests. No punishments, no points deduction and no rumors or whatever existed.

The final race isn't cheating, if a referee makes a mistake in a football match you can't accuse one of the teams of cheating. Even Mercedes commented within hours after the race that Red Bull and Max Verstappen did nothing wrong; they did what every team and driver would do. Win the race given the chance they had.

[topicseed]

Hamilton was not ahead going into Abu Dhabi's race. If both crashed, Max Verstappen would have been the champion.

This is because he won more races.

[lesstyzing]

>> Sorry but Hamilton was ahead going into the last race

He wasn’t. They were tied on points going into the last race. It was a huge talking point as it had been a long time since two drivers went into the finale tied on points.

Bad decision making by the stewerds isn’t cheating, even if you think it’s unfair. It would be cheating is Red Bull had bribed them but that never happened.

[michaelcampbell]

> Sorry but Hamilton was ahead going into the last race

cite? Based on what numbers?