IMOLA, Italy — Ferrari will be reluctant to admit it, but the pressure ratchets up when it races on home soil. The expectations of victory are always significantly multiplied in Italy and the cost of mistakes become massively amplified.
It’s a pressure no other team in F1 faces. Individual drivers may feel extra pressure when they race in front of their home crowd, but no team carries the hopes of a nation in the same way Ferrari carries Italy’s.
It’s impossible to directly link that weight of expectation to the mistakes made by Ferrari drivers Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz in Imola over the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix weekend, but it does make the missed opportunity all the more galling for a team that has always run on a heady mix of emotion and passion.
“Certainly the expectation levels were very high here in Italy and we tried to calm them down,” team boss Mattia Binotto said on Sunday evening after Ferrari left Imola with just 20 points from a potential 59. “We did whatever we could internally in the team to try to relieve the pressure and make sure that we stayed concentrated and focused over the weekend.”
Ferrari has only won once in Italy in the past 12 years, thanks to Leclerc at Monza’s Italian Grand Prix in 2019, and Imola seemed like the perfect opportunity to reward the its loyal following with another home win. At the previous round in Australia, the team was looked unbeatable as Leclerc took zero risks on his way to his most comfortable victory of his F1 career, but in Imola it was different.
Sainz’s weekend got off to a bad start when he spun in qualifying and damaged his car so badly that he couldn’t take part in the pole position shootout. He later said the accident was not down to pressure and that he was simply experimenting with different lines through the Rivazza corners, but the mistake put him on the back foot for the rest of the weekend before he was ultimately taken out of Sunday’s grand prix in a first corner collision with Daniel…
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