Formula 1: Can Mercedes win all 21 races in the 2019 season?

After winning the 2019 Formula 1 season’s first five races, can Mercedes run the table and win each of the 16 remaining races on the schedule?

Five races into the 21-race 2019 Formula 1 season, every team not named Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport are still searching for their first victory of the season.

Mercedes teammates Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas have combined to win each of the season’s first five races, giving the team seven consecutive victories going back to last season. Hamilton has earned five of these seven victories, including three so far this season, while Bottas has earned two, both this season.

It seems crazy to even consider at this point with the season not even being one-quarter of the way complete, but do Mercedes have what it takes to run the table and win each of the remaining 16 races on the schedule and go 21 for 21 in 2019?

Mercedes have been dominant since the V6 turbo hybrid era began in the 2014 season. They have won 79 of the 105 races that have been contested since the 2014 season began.

They won 16 of the 19 races that were contested in the 2014 season, 16 of the 19 races that were contested in the 2015 season, 19 of the 21 races that were contested in the 2016 season, 12 of the 20 races that were contested in the 2017 season and 11 of the 21 races that were contested in the 2018 season.

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But after two seasons during which their dominance tapered off, the Brackley-based team have taken their dominance to a new level in the 2019 season.

For a driver for another team to win a race, that driver must first break into the top two. Three different drivers aside of Hamilton and Bottas have finished on the podium so far this season, but they have all done so via third place finishes.

Scuderia Ferrari’s Sebastian Vettel has finished in third place twice so far this season, as has Aston Martin Red Bull Racing’s Max Verstappen, and Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc has done so once.

Hamilton and Bottas have, in some order, finished in the top two in each of the first five races of the season. Never before had a team recorded more than three consecutive 1-2 finishes to open up a season in Formula 1 history, and Mercedes’ streak of such finishes to open up the 2019 season is now at five races and counting.

Throughout the V6 turbo hybrid era, Mercedes’ longest win streaks are 10 races each. They won 10 consecutive races from the 2015 season into the 2016 season, and they won 10 consecutive races during the 2016 season itself.

But winning 21 consecutive races in the 2019 season (23 including their two consecutive victories to close out the 2018 season) is not as far-fetched as it seems.

Take away the disastrous first-lap crash in the 2016 Spanish Grand Prix between Hamilton and teammate Nico Rosberg, and Mercedes undoubtedly would have gone on to win that race as well.

Their two 10-race win streaks were separated only by this race, so a victory in this race would have created a 21-race win streak that ended only after an engine failure cost Hamilton a victory in the 2016 Malaysian Grand Prix.

Add in the five consecutive victories that they earned to close out the 2016 season, Mercedes literally could have entered the 2017 season on a 27-race win streak.

As much as the media may want to hype up a brewing intense rivalry between Hamilton and Bottas, the toxic relationship that existed between Hamilton and Rosberg as teammates, especially during the 2016 season, simply does not exist between Hamilton and Bottas (yet, at least), so it is hard to see them tangling like Hamilton and Rosberg did in the 2016 Spanish Grand Prix.

Just look at the start of this past Sunday’s Spanish Grand Prix. Bottas started the race from the pole position, but Hamilton got a better start from second place, took the lead right away, and went on to lead all 66 of the race’s laps.

Bottas did not push the issue as much as he could have at the start and ended up settling for second place. While this may make him vulnerable to the five-time champion in the long run, it makes Mercedes less vulnerable as a team to what happened in the 2016 Spanish Grand Prix.

And above all, it boosts the odds of their five-race win streak to start the season growing into a gigantic win streak.

That said, there are still certainly tracks on the schedule that should play to the benefit of Ferrari and Red Bull Racing, the only two teams aside of Mercedes that have won any of the last 123 races going back to early in the 2013 season, just as they have in recent seasons. But right now, these two teams are effectively in their own battle for “best of the rest” behind Formula 1’s one and only dominant force.

Will Mercedes end up with 21 victories in 21 races (23 victories in 23 races going back to last year) by the time the 2019 Formula 1 season comes to an end? If not, how many races will they win, and how will the driver and team championship battles shape out? As of now, nobody has anything for the Silver Arrows, and it appears as though a tight championship battle between Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas could be brewing as a result of it.