What makes 2023 F1 season one of the most competitive ones for over a decade?

Despite Red Bull's incredible dominance in the first three races of the 2023 F1 season, the current season is surely one of the most competitive campaigns in over a decade.

The Anglo-Austrian team has won every race so far from pole position and has established itself as the benchmark in the modern ground effect era of the sport. However, data suggests that teams are now closer than they have ever been since 2009.

Despite sitting ahead of Williams in the constructors' championship, AlphaTauri has been the slowest team in 2023 thus far. However, their average laptime is only 1.96% slower than Red Bull, which equates to around 1.7 seconds per lap.

This is in contrast to the 2022 F1 season, where three teams - Haas, Aston Martin, and Williams - lagged behind Ferrari by over 2% in terms of laptime.

Looking back, the 2021 season was relatively competitive for most teams, with Williams trailing behind Mercedes by 1.98%. However, Haas' decision to not develop their car resulted in them being over 2.5 seconds slower than the constructors' champions.

Compared to the 2012 F1 season, where seven teams were within approximately 1% of the pacesetters McLaren, only three teams can currently claim that in 2023. Nevertheless, the large gap to the back of the grid, which was over five seconds, was largely inflated by the incredibly slow Caterham, Marussia, and HRT teams.

Thus, we have to look back as far as the 2009 season to find a season that was more competitive across the entire grid than the current 2023 season.

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F1 to test new qualifying format in 2023

In an effort to reduce waste, F1 has decided to experiment with a new qualifying format during two race weekends in 2023, cutting the number of slick tires allotted to each driver from 13 to 11.

The Emilia Romagna GP will be the first location to experiment with this new format, given the high success rate of the current qualifying structure, which was introduced in 2006. The new format will remove two sets of tires from the pool, forcing drivers to be more mindful of their tire usage during qualifying and introducing a new strategic element to the process.

Drivers will have access to four soft, three hard, and four medium tire compounds during the qualifying rounds. In Q1, drivers can only use hard tires, followed by medium tires in Q2 and soft tires in Q3.

The sport is yet to announce the second venue where this new qualifying format will be tested. Speaking on the new F1 qualifying system with GPBlog, Pirelli's motorsport manager Mario Isola said:

"On those race weekends, the number of slicks available to drivers will be 11 instead of 13. With this alternative tyre selection, we will have the hard tyre for Q1, the medium tyre for Q2 and the soft tyre for Q3, with two sets of each tyre. In qualifying, conditions will then be the same for everyone.''

It will be interesting to see if this new qualifying format proves to be a success in times to come.