As Red Bull claims 21 of 22 wins, F1 CEO, Stefano Domenicali believes that there will be increased competition next season.

Of course, he has little choice to say otherwise since fears of continued dominance by Max Verstappen and Red Bull would turn off fans and sponsors alike.

Such was its dominance Red Bull scored more points than Mercedes and Ferrari combined this year, and only witnessed two DNFs over the entire season.

With the rules unchanged next year, as Lewis Hamilton admitted, with its dominance this year Red Bull was able to start work on its 2024 contender sooner, furthermore, this time around there will be no restrictions in windtunnel time as here was with this year's car due to the 2022 budget cap breach.

Despite this however, Domenicali is confident that the opposition will close in next season.

Congratulations to Max," he told Sky Sports. "It was something impressive in terms of maturity in terms of standards, to Red Bull.

"I'm sure that that's the aim of all the teams, is to try to show the level of their engineering, the level of their capacity and capability to improve," he added. "As always I'm a guy that doesn't like to speak because there's always a lot of people who are speaking and then have been contradicted."

Despite the stability of the rules and the budget cap, Domenicali cites McLaren as an example of how teams can still take a significant step forward.

"To the critics that will say with a budget cap you cannot develop the car, I would say McLaren proves that is not right," he said.

Of course, continued domination in 2024 would no doubt extend until 2025 also, and though the fear of this will have the sport's stakeholders extremely worried, the Italian is adamant that no short-term measures should be introduced before the rules overhaul of 2026.

"There are two years that are really crucial because then we're going to have a change, maybe related to the new balance of the power unit and so on," he said.

"You saw qualifying, 20 cars in less than one second," pointing to the Abu Dhabi gid. "So in qualifying we are very, very close.

"Of course race pace is different, and I think that these will be the major things that we're going to see different next year."

With Sky's cameras focussing on his face it was unclear whether his fingers were crossed or not, and if so how tightly.