Lewis Hamilton says a ban on developing next year’s car until a fixed date could held stop Red Bull Racing from consolidating its hefty pace advantage in future season.

Red Bull Racing’s RB19 is comfortably the fastest car on the grid this year and the easy championship favourite, and team principal Christian Horner has suggested Milton Keynes has already switched focus to its 2024 challenger.

The redirection of development resources is encouraged in part by the team’s punishment for breaking the 2021 cost cap, for which it was slapped with a 10 per cent reduction in wind tunnel time.

But the decision was made easier by the size of Red Bull Racing’s advantage, which almost guarantees the team the title regardless of whether it continues to bring upgrades this season.

It’s a foreboding scenario for its would-be challengers and fans of the sport, who are facing another stretch of one-team domination fresh from eight successive years of Mercedes constructors championships.

Hamilton was the chief beneficiary of the German marque’s glittering reign, but the Briton said the sport must find a way to break the cycle of supremacy and open up the competition for regular victories.

“In my 17 years of being here, even before I got here, you would see periods of dominance, and it continues to happen,” he said, per Autosport.

“I was very fortunate to have one of those periods, and Max is having one now.

“With the way it’s going, it will continue to happen over and over again, and I don’t think we need that in the sport.”

Hamilton suggested the way to break the cycle was to ban teams from getting a head start on their cars for the following year, thereby preventing them from banking a big advantage for use in subsequent campaigns.

“When you are so far ahead, 100 points ahead, you don’t really need to do a lot of development on your car, so you can start earlier on your next car,” he said.

“And with the budget cap, that means spending that year’s money on next year’s car.

“But if everyone had a time, for example, if everyone knew when we can really start, whatever date it is — October is way too late probably, but 1 August, something like that — then no-one has a head start, and then it’s a real race in that short space of time for the future car.

“I don’t know, maybe that would help everyone be closer the following year.”

Formula 1 has instituted a cost cap to equalise the field. Teams also have their wind tunnel time restricted in reverse order of their position in the constructors championship, giving the lower-ranked squads more development resource to close the gap.

But Hamilton said there was more the sport could do to rein in the biggest teams.

“I might be wrong, but something’s got to change,” he said. “When we were winning world championships we could start earlier than everybody else.

“It would be cool to see in the next period if we don’t have huge bands of time when one team is ahead, because we want to see better racing.”

Verstappen was asked whether he agreed with the concept of a restricted development window, but the Dutchman was unmoved.

“Life is unfair as well, it‘s not only in Formula 1,” said the title leader. “A lot of things are unfair, so we just have to deal with it.”