Formula One’s commercial supremo Bernie Ecclestone has backed Red Bull’s call for action to rein in Mercedes’s engine advantage and make races more competitive after a one-sided start to the season.

However, the 84-year-old played down talk of the former champions walking away from a sport they dominated only recently.

“They are absolutely 100% right,” Ecclestone said when asked about the Red Bull principal Christian Horner’s statement that the FIA should apply an “equalisation mechanism” to narrow the gap.

“There is a rule that I think [the former president] Max [Mosley] put in when he was there that in the event … that a particular team or engine supplier did something magic – which Mercedes have done – the FIA can level up things. They [Mercedes] have done a first class job which everybody acknowledges. We need to change things a little bit now and try and level things up a little bit.”

Ecclestone said it was not a case of doing everything possible to stop Mercedes but simply to allow other manufacturers more flexibility.

“What we should have done was frozen the Mercedes engine and leave everybody else to do what they want so they could have caught up,” he said. “We should support the FIA to make changes.”