Why Hamilton/Rosberg Could Be The Biggest Inter-Team F1 Battle Since Senna/Prost

There's no getting away from it, Mercedes is absolutely trouncing every other team in F1 at the moment, perhaps even more so than Red Bull has done in the last few seasons. The gap is so huge that other teams are unlikely to catch the Brackley-based squad any time soon. Domination usually means a snoozefest with the better driver - Sebastian Vettel, in the case of Red Bull - clocking up win after win, clinching the championship by a country mile.

This season, however, is set to be different. And Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg's incredible scrap for the lead at yesterday's Bahrain Grand Prix is evidence of that fact.

This showed us two very important things - firstly Hamilton and Rosberg appear to be closely matched, but crucially, Mercedes is allowing its drivers to race; no team orders going on here. This means that while the two Silver Arrows are likely to lock out the front row of every grid and go racing off into the distance, we'll have two incredibly talented drivers fighting tooth and nail for the victory.

Image source: Mercedes AMG Petronas

In fact, if the season continues to play out like this, we could have another year like 1988, where McLaren utterly dominated (winning all but one race), with the driver's title hotly contested between McLaren team-mates Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost. If that's the case, it won't do much for inter-team relations at Mercedes, but it could make this one of the most exciting F1 seasons in recent years.