“I am very surprised sometimes to see people wondering why there is domination,” said Jean Todt, the team director during Ferrari’s domination last decade and now president of the International Automobile Federation, or F.I.A., the sports’s governing body. “There has always been domination. For the 50 years or more that I have been following motor racing, you have domination. You have domination in each category of motor sport. You have domination in any kind of sport, not only in motor racing. And that is the challenge: to break the domination and to do a better job.”

Endurance racing, the second-highest form of racing, embodied by the 24 Hours of Le Mans in France, has been dominated by Audi for most of the 21st century. And even before Todt’s half-century, Grand Prix racing went through periods of different team and driver domination. The Argentine driver Juan Manuel Fangio was the champion in half of the Formula One seasons in the 1950s. The Mercedes Silver Arrow cars dominated the second half of the 1930s; Bugattis were dominant in the late 1920s.

There are similar reigns in other sports — exceptional teams like the New York Yankees in baseball, the Los Angeles Lakers in basketball, Barcelona and Real Madrid in soccer. In ice hockey, the Montreal Canadiens have been the most victorious team in National Hockey League history, winning the Stanley Cup 24 times — including every year from 1956 to 1960 — and playing in the finals an additional 10 times. The same phenomenon is seen in nonteam sports like golf, tennis, or track and field, where certain athletes frequently dominate for years.

The champion hurdler Edwin Moses, 60, who compiled a nine-year, nine-month and nine-day winning streak in 122 races from September 1977 to June 1987 and set four world records in the 400-meter hurdles, noted that unlike in most sports, dominance in auto racing can be made or broken by regulations.

“It’s all technical,” said Moses, who follows Formula One closely through his role leading the Laureus sports awards. “It’s not like me boring over 10 hurdles and wearing everybody down time after time again, where everything is basically the same except for your conditioning and the time of the season and things like that.”