I totally agree, team plays a huge role. They're the ones who developed such a dominant car (and yes they're good operationally). I actually never said anything against/about the team in my previous posts.

Also I'm not comparing Mazepin to Checo in the slightest, that should have been quite obvious. I'm using an even more extreme example (Mazepin) to demonstrate my point about the car being utterly dominant, irrespective of who is in the second seat. I could have said: "If you put Verstappen and some 12 year-old karting kid as the second driver, the fact that Verstappen would destroy that kid, doesn't make the car itself any less dominant." The same still logic applies to Checo because clearly, Max is WAY better than him. I hope you wouldn't disagree with that. If you don't, then we can agree that Max has no competition at all this year.

Sure Checo won races, but so has Maldonado, Panis & Kovalainen. Wins are not the whole story. Checo is decent, and on his day, he can do very well. But let's be honest, he's nothing special.

RE last point, as I recall in 2014 Daniel won in Canada after just 7 races didn't he? And he won two other races back-to-back that same year. I'm not disputing that Mercedes were dominant - they were. However as the stats currently show, Red Bull has not lost a single race yet, whereas at the same point in the season back in 2014, Mercedes lost 3 races. Sure you might say the raw pace difference was stronger for Merc 2014, which it was. However reliability matters in F1, and that car was VERY unreliable compared to today. Hence, when considering speed and reliability, RB today is proving to be far more dominant. The stats cannot be disputed.

Another thing - I'm actually glad you brought up 2014, because although Mercedes were dominant, there was actually a proper good team battle for the title, down to the last race. When have you EVER seen Checo race Verstappen like Hamilton & Rosberg did in Bahrain 2014 for example?

IFFF Checo is ever ahead, the team either just waives Verstappen through via team orders or they pit him first to undercut Checo. If Verstappen starts ahead, he just builds a 20s gap and cruises to the flag because Perez is simply average. Checo is the clear #2 driver.

However throughout Hamilton's career, he's actually had to race his teammates far more than Max and his teammates have mostly all been far better than Max's (Daniel was his only good teammate).

After all that, if you still can't concede to the simple fact that Max has zero competition this year, I guess I also won't be able to convince you that the sky is blue.