George Russell suspects Red Bull might be deliberately hiding their true race pace to avoid FIA intervention.
Red Bull are clearly the quickest team on the grid in these early weeks of the 2023 Formula 1 season. The Milton Keynes-based outfit have won all three races so far and may well have finished first and second in them all, had it not been for Sergio Perez's qualifying accident in Australia.
Despite clearly displaying superior race pace again in Melbourne, race winner Max Verstappen only ever managed a nine-second gap over his nearest on-track rival during the longest stint of what was an incident-filled race.
The number of crashes, safety cars and red flags no doubt played a role in that, but Russell thinks something else was at play. The Brit believes Red Bull might have been sandbagging on purpose in a bid to stop the FIA from getting involved.
After all, the governing body has, in the past, not been shy to intervene when one team is clearly dominating the world championship. An FIA clampdown on some of the design innovations which help make that RB19 so fast might negate a significant chunk of the advantage Red Bull have on their rivals at the moment.
"For sure they're holding back," Russell told the BBC Chequered Flag podcast. "I think they are almost embarrassed to show their full potential because the faster they seem, the more that the sport is going to try to hold them back somehow.
"I think realistically they probably have seven-tenths advantage over the rest of the field. I don't know what the pace difference looks like at the moment but Max has got no reason to be pushing it, nor has Red Bull. They've done a really great job to be fair to them. We can't take that away, and we clearly have to up our game."
However, Red Bull's Helmut Marko has asserted that rival teams have already begun to close the gap. He pointed at the fact Perez was only able to make it up to fifth place as evidence to support that claim.
The Austrian said: "You can see how close it is when a little thing doesn't work out because we're always said to have a superiority that only exists when everything is running smoothly. Our rivals Aston Martin, Ferrari and Mercedes have made gains."
