After Jeddah qualifying the picture is even worse than what was seen in Bahrain where Ferrari was a tenth slower in pure performance and the problems seemed "only" with tyre management in the race.
Red Bull is a clear half second ahead in performance which is huge gap, also because the others are so close to each other.
My two cents on the future of the season: Mercedes openly declare that their project has failed and will soon align themselves with Red Bull style. They were fooled by the good performance of late 2022 otherwise they would have already done it.
Ferrari, which today has very similar performances to Mercedes, despite understanding the difficulties of doing so given that the F1-75 was an almost successful project (but mainly because the RB project was very crude and overweight at the beginning), should probably do it too, as soon as possible.
The SF-23 has lost the grip characteristics of its predecessor, I see no future. If they use the next 5-6 races or even half a season to develop a losing car, it will probably just be a waste of time.
Close battle and fun behind but boring ahead (except today 🥳).