Ferrari improved their position in the constructors’ championship for the second year in a row in 2022. On the face of it, that makes team principal Mattia Binotto’s decision to resign, announced today, a questionable one.
The team slumped to a woeful sixth place in 2020, but rebounded quickly, rising to third place last year. A place among F1’s ‘big three’ teams has to be considered the minimum of what a team with Ferrari’s gigantic resources is capable of.
They appeared to build on that this season by climbing to second place in the championship. But Ferrari’s ambitions are far greater than that, and their failure to deliver a title this year has to be considered in terms of the scale of the opportunity they missed.
When Binotto took over in charge of the team at the beginning of 2019, some of the ingredients of success were already in place. Sebastian Vettel finished runner-up in the 2017 and 2018 title fights, and the team did likewise in the constructors’ championship, winning 11 races over those two seasons.
Ferrari began their first year under Binotto once again rivalling Mercedes for wins. But Red Bull, who had switched to Honda power units during the off-season, were first to beat the silver team to a victory.
Binotto saw Ferrari miss opportunities to win over the first dozen races due to unreliability, driver errors and strategic slip-ups. The latter was highlighted in Monaco, where Vettel’s new team mate Charles Leclerc was eliminated during Q1.
As the season went on, the increasingly impressive Leclerc posed an obvious challenge to Vettel’s supremacy at the team. This generated considerable friction, several rows over team orders and one collision between the pair. Nonetheless Ferrari managed to claim three consecutive wins in spite of this, and second in the constructors’ standings again.
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But their cars’ straight-line speed had also become a focus of speculation and this posed a greater threat to their competitiveness. Following a lengthy investigation, the FIA came to a private agreement with the team under which new checks on power unit legality for the whole field were introduced. This was announced on the eve of the 2020 campaign, during which Ferrari’s straight-line speed was a persistent weakness and the team slumped to sixth place in the championship.
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