McLaren only needs "a little something" more and Max Verstappen will be legitimately beatable.
That’s the view of former Formula 1 driver Timo Glock, after Red Bull’s exhausted Verstappen only managed to beat Miami winner Lando Norris to the chequered flag by less than a single second.
"The air is getting thinner," Glock told Sky Deutschland. "You could hear on the radio how high Max’s pulse was.
"All McLaren needs is a little something more and then they can really put him under pressure for the whole race. McLaren is absolutely there."
Even Red Bull advisor Dr Helmut Marko admits that the McLaren was actually the faster car on Sunday.
"We wouldn’t have won without Max, so thank God for Max," he beamed. "We have a lot of work ahead of us now."
All eyes are now on Monaco, where Verstappen and Norris will go head-to-head again. "We’ll see," McLaren boss Andrea Stella said on Sunday when asked if Norris could win in the Principality.
"It’s good for us, good for Formula 1, good for the fans."
Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc completed the Imola podium, but he was a further seven seconds adrift. "Now there is no doubt," said the Monegasque. "We are further behind than we expected."
That is despite the fact that Ferrari arrived at its home race with a major car upgrade.
"There is more in it," Leclerc said. "We expected to be a little closer, but the season is long and there will be opportunities to extract more from this package."
Even further back was Carlos Sainz, who said: "We have to analyse it calmly, because I can’t afford to have such a boring race, where I can’t fight because of inconsistencies in the car.
"Between the aerodynamics and the engine there has been something that has not worked and we will have to look at it."
But even if McLaren was the closest challenger in Miami and now Imola, there is no doubt that Ferrari is also now ending Red Bull’s long period of dominance.
"After Miami you could have maybe said that it was the safety car or it was luck," said Dutch-Chinese racing driver Ho-Pin Tung.
"But McLaren have now shown that they are super fast over one lap and they are super fast over a race distance," he told Viaplay. "They simply now have a package with which they can really fight."