Is Andretti Formula E's Red Bull equivalent team, one so set on a singular course with its star driver Jake Dennis that its secondary car is barely noticeable, even occasionally obsolete?
It's a fascinating question because, factually, you'd have to concur it probably is - from a sporting standpoint at least. Over the last four seasons, the stats back that way of thinking up quite conclusively.
Since he joined the Andretti squad in late 2020, Dennis has had five team-mates: Maximilian Guenther, Oliver Askew (pictured below), Andre Lotterer, Norman Nato and Nico Mueller.
In that time, he has outscored each of them whether it be on points, poles, podiums, wins and obviously championships, through his brilliant and crowning 2023 campaign.
The closest anyone came to Dennis was in his rookie season of 2021 when Guenther was 25 points off him, albeit that was in the unfair madhouse qualifying days.
Since then though Dennis has also beaten Askew by 102 points, Lotterer by 206 points and Nato by 75 points.
"I'm the first one to say we're a one-car team at times and that that has come up multiple times over the last four years," Andretti team principal Roger Griffiths tells The Race.
That’s as honest as it is factual from Griffiths. Could it be, though, that if you dig a little deeper, through a bit of Andretti impatience with some of those Dennis team-mates and some classic Formula E mistakes, the reality is that Andretti is mostly suffering from a perfect storm of a domineering primary driver simply delivering more? Or maybe you prefer to call it the 'Verstappen Syndrome'.
That's quite a neat synopsis as Dennis knows Verstappen well because he works for him to a large extent on the Red Bull simulator and he raced against him in the lower junior ranks, occasionally beating the now four-time Formula 1 champion.
'Verstappen Syndrome' manifests itself in the dominance of a rare talent that is so completely suited to both the team and the series that all comers are destroyed. It's like a turbocharged law of sporting nature.
Mueller, a seasoned professional who is clearly aware of Dennis's track record, was one of the wonders of last season. In an Abt car that had no real right to be anywhere near the top six, he finished there five times.
That, in combination with him becoming a Porsche factory driver last summer, meant that the Porsche customer Andretti team believed at last it had at least a driver that could crack that syndrome.
So far, albeit after just four races, Mueller has scored two points to Dennis's 25. Are the symptoms continuing, or will Mueller eventually start to buck the trend? The jury is still out on that one and probably will be until at least after the Tokyo double-header in May.
So, could it be that there's something in the make-up of the Andretti team that is tilting the balance further than is known in Dennis's favour?
"Obviously the two cars are identical and we have the two engineering teams, we don't switch people around," says Griffiths.
"Everybody has full access to all of the data; we're not hiding anything from anyone. We discuss openly with both drivers exactly what we've done, what we're going to do, so everybody has exactly the same information.
"For sure, if I found out somebody was holding back on something and only allowing it to go on one car, I'd be pretty upset.
"I just don't know what the answer is. Is Jake really that good, which is maybe the reason? Or have we just misjudged all of the other people that we put in the car, in that second seat?"
Griffiths has been in charge at Andretti since the very start and has overseen 11 wins and Dennis's title in 2023. There is obvious confusion around why his team-mates have been nowhere near him in points collation. But as Griffiths says, it's not because the team has chosen out and out duds.
Guenther got close to Dennis and won a race in their season together but at that stage just didn't quite have the consistency (and many feel he still doesn't possess as much as he should).
Askew was an up-and-coming talent who had won Indy Lights races and initially showed promise in IndyCar. He also showed flashes of real speed in Formula E, notably in London and Seoul in his single season.
Lotterer was a proven podium gatherer and really should have won a race for DS Techeetah on merit. But his Andretti season in 2023 was so bad it even completely confused the driver himself.
Nato perhaps got closest to Dennis on occasion in qualifying but again, it never materialised consistently.
"We talk about all this at length," says Griffiths. "What do we need to do? Add how we do it because I want to find someone that's going to push Jake really hard to see if there is another level that we can uncover."
That's the great carrot at the end of the stick that Andretti is proverbially waving. By his own admission, last season, when Dennis finished seventh in the standings with one victory and three podiums, he was below par. But still, he beat his team-mate comfortably.
It is Mueller's job to join Dennis at the front, as he did briefly in Mexico City, and the feeling is that Mueller will eventually prove to be Dennis's toughest team-mate. It will be a major surprise to most, and an unpleasant one for Mueller, if he copies the previous incumbents' points deficits.
Even when Dennis has off days, as he did in qualifying for the second Jeddah race (he started 19th), he digs deep and produces a stunner (he finished fourth).
So is Andretti the Red Bull of Formula E? No, it is not. How could it be? It has not swapped drivers mid-season (bar an enforced Lotterer-David Beckmann Jakarta change in 2023) and it backs its driver evenly and fairly as far as we can see.
The issue is that Dennis is just extraordinarily adept at understanding the nuances and the strategies of Formula E. He's a clever racer, a brilliant sim tester, and an excellent team player to boot.
All of his team-mates liked being with Dennis in the same camp. He got along famously with each and everyone. Hold that up against Jean-Eric Vergne or Pascal Wehrlein's team-mates in the past and it's a very different feeling.
Dennis is beating experienced, up-and-coming or established professionals handsomely and it's just a matter of fact, slam-dunk statistics.
The emphasis now is on how Andretti can assist the other side of the garage as much as possible to at least help Mueller get close to Dennis. Perhaps this is the one similarity with Red Bull, in the sense that, when you have such a special talent, how do you gauge what's to be expected?
Andretti will be hoping that its recent trend of driver disparity can be at least improved on in a season when Nissan is perhaps facing the same problems with a current Oliver Rowland-Nato imbalance, and both Porsche and Jaguar drivers could get in each other's way and squabble among themselves.
That clearly shifts the pressure onto the Mueller side of the garage, which in turn can sometimes add to the problems. Yet, the calm and methodical Mueller feels like the best bet to deal with all of that and be able to solve a problem that's clearly gone on for too long now.
