With big regulation changes, as we had last year, the performance gaps normally close up across the field as time goes on. Yet last year was closer than this year, and Mercedes and Ferrari are further behind now than last season. They have even been jumped by Aston Martin, traditionally a mid-field team.

The surprise is not so much that this has happened, but that neither Mercedes nor Ferrari changed direction for their 2023 cars.

F1 pundits often talk about car concepts and how they look, but the over-body airflow – the parts of the car that can be seen with the naked eye, such as the sidepods – dramatically affects the under-body flow, which is crucial.

Why have Mercedes and Ferrari failed to move forward?

It probably comes down to how they use their wind tunnel. Every time a team uses its wind tunnel, it wants to learn something new or find something that moves it forward.

At some point, it becomes difficult to continue getting those returns.

Ferrari appears to have reached that point, and Mercedes likely reached that point last year, but were too blind to admit it. Although Aston Martin’s car has differences to the Red Bull, they have shown that this general “family” concept works well.

Red Bull still has that performance and understanding of returns coming to them, and has to make it pay because it has far less wind-tunnel time this year than its rivals.

Ultimately, though, Ferrari and Mercedes have not moved forward because they are stuck with what they had last year. It was not good enough then and is not good enough now.

For F1 fans hoping for a tight season, this does not bode well for the year ahead.

It is difficult to see either Ferrari or Mercedes challenging for wins.

Ferrari is unlikely to make any significant inroads this year. It could prove a nuisance to Red Bull at some tracks, but will not find the two or three tenths of a second needed to be a legitimate challenger.

Mercedes needs to eat some humble pie and build a car different to the one it is running at the moment. If it changes direction, its team has the determination, experience and commitment to keep moving forward.

The big concern, though, is that it claims to meet its targets with the W14 vehicle.

Either those targets were too simple or were simply wrong. It could be the case that Mercedes still does not understand its whole package and how to optimise the characteristics of these ground-effect cars.

If that is where it has tripped up, its understanding of the car’s performance will not change overnight. It might be able to change the bodywork, but the crucial and most difficult thing is understanding how to get the best from that package.

We then move to the question of whether Red Bull can win all of the 23 races this season, something that has never been achieved before. It would be an unbelievable feat, but is probably too big an ask.

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The biggest hope any non-Red Bull team have of winning a race is reliability. There are so few power units and components available to use this year without incurring a penalty. All drivers will have to take extras at some point in the season and coming through the field always has its risks.

Yet, as we have seen for Ferrari, reliability problems affect any team, and the Scuderia have already had their fair share.

Gary Anderson is a former Jordan and Jaguar F1 technical director. – The Telegraph, London