Why Binotto retains faith in his F1 strategy team at Ferrari

In fact, he is robust in the defence of his strategy department and, while accepting there is always room for improvement, he is crystal clear that he has the right people in place in the right jobs.

It is a stance that may come as a surprise to some F1 fans, who have heavily criticised the team for what have appeared to be a series of critical errors this season that have cost championship hopeful Charles Leclerc dearly.

In Monaco, with Leclerc in the lead, it failed to respond in time to the extent the track was drying after Sergio Perez made the switch to slicks.

It then further compounded it with a badly timed second stop that allowed Leclerc to be jumped by Max Verstappen as well.

At the British Grand Prix, Ferrari’s failure to pit Leclerc at the final safety car restart led to him falling from the lead to fourth by the end.

Then in Hungary, a hard tyre choice left the Monegasque powerless to defend against title rival Verstappen on a day when the real team problem was actually the lack of performance from the F1-75.

Added on top of this is the way that the strategy panned out for Carlos Sainz in France, when TV made it appear that Ferrari’s strategists were confused and indecisive.

Binotto is open that Ferrari can do better and lessons have been taken on board, especially from Monaco, about the systems the team needs in place to make better informed calls on the pitwall.

However, he says that doing things better is a world away from believing that Ferrari has a fundamental problem with its strategy – because he says there are times when it has beaten rival Red Bull by doing a better job with its tyre calls in the race.

“I think there’s always a way of improving ourselves,” he said in an exclusive interview with Motorsport.com. “You cannot be perfect, and you will never be perfect. So no doubt, we need to improve ourselves on the aero, chassis, power unit, on strategy or whatever we can.

“But having said that, I think I have got a great team on the strategy, and I do not feel it’s a weakness.”

Hamilton Abu Dhabi comparisons

Binotto says it is important, when properly evaluating strategy calls, that they are not judged solely on how things turned out with hindsight.

Instead, what needs looking at is whether or not the right decision was made with the information that was available to the team on the pitwall at the time.

For in F1, there are…